Consanguinity
by auntarctica
Summary: Sometimes I think we are like Wrath, o my Brother; stubbornly holding on to a heavy and precarious hatred that will ultimately destroy us both. First Person Vergil POV. Slash.
1. Chapter 1

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**_Consanguinity_**

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I remember God; his face was broad and insincere.

In his house, we were like children, unable to reach the table. We sat at his feet, and awaited his crumbs. He patted our heads and murmured vague endearments that had no affiliation with love.

His radiance was blinding, as you might expect, his manner serene and aloof. In his face were three eyes that looked straight ahead. We did not displease him, for he was monolithic. When he sat, his head touched the white vaults of the ceiling. When he walked, his shoulders dusted the sky.

Once, he whispered in my ear and I forgot your name.

And it was not Good.

It sounds like a fable, Brother, I admit. Something we were told when we were young, perhaps- a macabre little anecdote to buy Mother a moment of peace.

Indeed, as I stand here now and watch the liquid sky, I am tempted to believe it was little more than a coma dream. But self-deception is an indulgence I have always disdained, and I will not deign to employ it now.

Little of that reality remains in me, truth to tell; I cannot map the days and nights I passed, ensconced in the exoskeleton that Mundus created to hold me.

It was not merely containment he sought, but transcendence. I have gained a new empathy for women, brother, as it was little more than a corporeal corset, in a sense, the device that distorted and reformed my essence into a new shape, hailed only as Nero Angelo.

Mundus did not wish for me to come unwillingly. His ego demanded me whole and traitorous. He caged me in a room, o my brother, that was a flawless replica of my own as I knew it in Mother's house, each lavish detail present and accounted for. He practiced persuasion, at first- even going so far as to make that woman out of ashes and oblivion- as if all I wanted for was the substance of an ersatz mother.

It was a miscalculation on his part, brother, but not so ill-conceived as you might think. Given the state I was in, he might have had me after all, had he but chosen the right relative.

However, he was guilty of the one of the most basic fallacies of logic; he drew the wrong conclusions about what he saw when he raped my mind, seeking to elicit and interpret my primal screams.

_You have suffered loss, Vergil_, he told me, and even in my battered condition, it amused me to hear a God so obviously pleased with himself, as if he'd won at charades.

_Estranged from a love that began in utero._

His words hurt me physically, like a bolt from the blue, blunt with unspoken truth, plucked from my innermost sanctum of self. Green sickness welled in my stomach, brother, upon being forced to consume them, for those thoughts were not yet ripe.

_You cry out for the womb, as all men do. But you have lost more than that. You have lost the tie that binds. The cord has been irretrievably cut by Fate._

"Not Fate." Softly spoken, almost not sounded. Betrayed by disorientation, and my own subconscious. "Pride." I remember the chill of fear that came over me, then, at the thought that his words would compel me to acknowledge what would surely be my devastation.

It is fortunate that Mundus did not hear my mindless whispers, absorbed as he was in fellating himself.

_To merely mend such a bond would be unworthy of my powers, Vergil. It would still bear the marks of imperfection. I will forge you a new one from wholecloth, unflawed and pristine._

Mundus may well have been a God, o my brother, and capable of making mothers from celestial scratch, but he was obviously not immune to the dangers of flawed assumption. Context is everything, as I so often told you, and Occam's Razor is not as sharp as it looks.

Perhaps I should phrase that as if you could truly hear me, Dante.

Though I did not know it at the time, Mundus had backed the wrong horse.

_I see the fount of your suffering_.

At that moment I was still in the grip of unkindest apprehension, however, dreading what agonizing epiphanies might come upon me as a result of God's presents.

_I have done. It is Good. I see all._

And lo, there was Tricia, resplendent in our mother's body, and little else.

_Vergil, I give you your mother_.

You'd remember her, Dante, though at the time she had no name, as she had only just stepped out of nether-ether. In any case, I believe you knew her by the snappier appellation of 'Trish'. Mundus always played to his house, o my brother.

She smiled.

I frowned.

"My mother never worked at Love Planet," I said, coolly. I felt my arrogance returning to serve me once more, as I realized Mundus had misfired badly.

Tricia looked confused, but continued to smile hopefully.

_Behold, for she is your mother in every aspect._

"Indeed, I'm seeing aspects of my mother I never cared to imagine," I replied, eyeing her scant ensemble with undisguised scorn.

"Is something wrong?" Tricia exclaimed, clearly distressed. Her arms shot out, as if to hold me. I gave her a withering look and circled back toward the other side of the room.

_You are in withdrawal. Your soul shudders from the affliction. I see all._

"So you hired me a stripper? To take the edge off?" I laughed bitterly. "I think you've got the wrong son of Sparda."

_Your mother cries out to you._

It was true. Tricia was crying, her hands outstretched, tears burning from the corners of her eyes. I turned away.

_Embrace your mother, Vergil._

"That isn't a mother," I said, darkly. "It's a weeping statue. You've performed a miracle. Now show me a card trick."

Just then the creature that favored our mother gave a ragged sob and threw herself toward me. My hand met her advance before she could even begin to react, and she crumpled at my feet, weeping most unattractively- not the false tears of artful pretense, but the unpretty and wracking sobs of real despair.

"Vergil," she moaned, her fingers blindly seeking the hem of my coat. "Please don't do this. Please, let me-"

"No."

I rejected her outright, although she begged me to at least pretend, for her sake, for mine. At the time I assumed that she feared being sent back to oblivion.

She needn't have worried. As it was, he found another use for her, did he not.

I wonder, my brother, if Tricia ever told you any of this. If she did, I am almost certain she did not tell you everything that transpired, and if by some small chance she did, I hope you understand the context in which I acted. In my cold rage, I knew no reason beyond defiance.

Mundus seemed to have fallen silent for the time, perhaps to see if I would warm to the sounds of her suffering, like a dutiful son.

Indeed, it was the only sound for several moments, and I felt no more endeared.

"Now then," I said, taking hold of her hair, which was long and golden, and straight as a stick. Pressing my lips together, I clearly remembered Eva, cheerfully lamenting how she could never convince it to curl, no matter what implement of torture she employed in the task.

This demon made of silica and sulfur-dust was not Eva, but she was afflicted with the same fashion limitations. I wondered how deep the deception ran. Would she have our Mother's ridiculous fear of spiders? Would she know the same songs?

She looked up at me, bewildered, but unflinching. Her eyes were red and swollen, but in them lay fierce adoration, a determined seed, no doubt planted by Mundus.

"What about you?" I sneered. "How thorough was he in his work?"

"What do you mean?"

"Were you created with the inherent need to love me?" I demanded in a whisper. "A wanting for a son?"

"Yes," she said, helplessly. "Yes, for you, Vergil. It's my only thought."

"I see," I said, coldly.

_Vergil._

Mundus was back, his tone more insistent.

_A mother needs the love of her son._

I narrowed my eyes.

This was not my mother, not yours, this demon who came out of oblivion just this hour. I would come to know her as Tricia, but at that moment she was an unformed pawn, tossed into my gilded cage like emotional chum. I felt nothing for his organic piecework.

I heard my own voice, brother, harsh and sibilant.

"Very well. Embrace me, if you must. It is what you want, isn't it?"

"Yes," she said softly, "Yes."

"Or…must I embrace you? Is that what you require?"

The look on Tricia's face was blissful as any chapel Madonna's, but I felt no compassion for anything in that moment, only a vast and arctic hatred for Mundus, and his twisted parlor tricks.

"Or perhaps you'd prefer a nice kiss," I hissed.

She nodded quickly, raising her face to mine, expectant and naïve, and I seized her with vicious precision, pressing my mouth roughly against hers.

A moan escaped her, and I felt the sting of the wintry smile that touched my lips. My cynical suspicion was confirmed; Mundus' creation knew nothing of what constituted maternal affection.

"My touch? Is that what you want?"

"Yes," she gasped. Her cheeks were flushed, her hands clutching me instinctively, for though she was not my mother, or anyone else's, Mundus had made her a woman.

My hands roamed her brutally, my motions coldly efficacious, calculated to evoke arousal. She arched into my hands, breathing heavily. Expertise did not fail me, o my brother, even if compassion did.

I tilted my head.

"You like that, _mother_? Does that suffice?"

Tricia was making inarticulate noises of what I presumed to be innocent delight.

My smile was bitterly amused as I spun her bodily around, so that her palms braced against the stone of the wall. She was utterly tractable, falling into position without question, her body imbued with ancient physical knowledge beyond her brief existence.

"Please," she crooned. "Please."

"Hear that, Mundus?" I muttered. "Of course you do."

Tight black leather, easing swiftly down over her hips- and I, freeing myself and entering her without preamble, shoving my cock deep and angling up as I began to thrust.

I was hard, yes, but not for any great want of the act, for the act was nothing but a means to vindication, o my brother.

Tricia was moaning, her body taut and responsive, pushing back against me wantonly as any whore, blissfully oblivious to the impropriety of our actions.

I looked up, turning my gaze toward the triumvirate of eyes that hovered in the sky, knowing they were there, though I could not see them through the ornate ceilings, knowing that Mundus knew no such limitations.

"Is this your idea of acting _in loco parentis_?" I demanded loudly. "I think you did not excel at Latin, despite your name."

Perhaps Mundus was too enraged to reply, or perhaps he was taken aback by my audacity. I cared nothing in the moment- I knew he was watching, and that was enough to drive my resolve.

Tricia was pleading, breathless and inaudible strings of syllables, her long fingers grasping the wall. She was begging in the broadest sense, the universal cry of an infant who knows not even what it needs. Desperate for what she was missing, no doubt, what this position, though compelling, did not afford.

I sighed.

"You don't know, do you?" I murmured. "Of course not."

Wordlessly I took her hand from the wall and placed it on her sex, holding it under my own as I pressed down in slow circles. She was slick with arousal. I could feel the marble intrusion of my own cock, relentlessly pushing into her from beneath.

Her thighs heaved outward at the touch, and she seemed to grasp the idea at once. I drew my hand away, as she began stroking herself with an enthusiasm that quite surpassed mine.

I wanted her to climax, o my brother, for nothing would speak louder than her pleasured convulsions at the end of my cock. Nothing else could possibly serve better to show Mundus how badly he had failed in his endeavor.

As her urgency grew, I increased my force. Now I was truly battering her, my hand braced against the wall beside her, my eyes fixed in concentration.

I knew I would not be able to come, Dante. Not like this, not here. Even considering the twisted cachet of fucking one's own mother in proxy, I was unmoved. Resentment and spite kept my cock stiff and willing, but they would not give me release.

It wouldn't have mattered to me, had it not been for the fact that circumstances demanded it. I knew all too well that Mundus would interpret any hesitation on my part as reluctance, as evidence that I, on some level, must be unsettled by this creature's resemblance to Eva, and I couldn't have that.

In the end, I turned to the only thing I knew of that had never failed to bring me to my knees. I thought of you, brother.

Culmination was swift and merciless.

Tricia screamed as she brought herself to orgasm, throwing her head back so that her long hair spilled over my flexing arms, and she tightened in her bliss, gripping me with intermittent ferocity, like the deadly pulse of electric current.

It was not bad, only lacking.

Lacking somehow, in something vital, but nevertheless I found myself at the peak seconds after, having coincided by chance and not design. It was a strange and brutal climax, brother, ripped from me in a sharp and cauterizing surge that was pleasurable but ultimately insignificant. It receded like tide, going out swiftly, and far more lamb-like than the transient bombast that announced it.

The demon beneath me was stunned and sweet, purring to herself- feeling, no doubt, that she had fulfilled all that she had been created for. Innocent, unknowing. Perhaps she thought like Eva, perhaps she even felt like Eva. Who knew what mannerisms had been plucked from my mind; which were pure extrapolation, which were colored by my interpretation, and which were veritable?

Perhaps she even screamed like Eva at the moment of sexual truth. I cannot say, and I had no real wish to contemplate.

In any case, with everything of Eva's that she had been given, there was nothing of Eva about her.

I pulled away from her without ceremony, and pulled myself together once more, running a hand back over the rough texture of my hair. I looked up slowly, seeking Mundus in the frescoed expanse of the ceiling.

"Next time you go minting mothers, you may want to fix that little…kink," I intoned, icily.

Tricia had turned around, and was leaning against the wall, clutching it with a flat palm, watching me with eyes wide and dazed, looking as if she wanted a cigarette badly, but of course she knew nothing of cigarettes.

All the better for me, as I find the habit repulsive.

Mundus chuckled, and it was the first mirth I'd ever heard from that stone idol.

_You have a vivid way of illustrating your convictions, Son of Sparda._

I felt mildly surprised by his good humor, which seemed, at the very least, unusual, and at the worst, ill-omened.

"You have a funny concept of maternal instinct," I returned, evenly.

_She was created to nurture you_.

"That was more nature than nurture."

_You impress me, hybrid, despite your intentions. You are colder than I anticipated. This bodes well for your future._

My eyes narrowed.

_Though it may have been rash to spill your seed inside her, Vergil. _

My smile was unflinchingly contemptuous. For a moment I wished for nothing more than to have you there, brother, so that we might share the hilarity of those asinine words that dripped straight from the maw of a God. Of course, in the adjacent moment it occurred to me that discerning subtle irony had never been your forte.

"I'm not unduly worried over it."

_If she should conceive, your son will be mine. _

I shook my head, as if he were a disappointing child.

"You called me a hybrid yourself, Mundus. Do I need to spell it out for you? My brother and I are essentially mules."

_You are sterile._

"Jackpot," I drawled.

_No matter. I am eager to press you into service, Vergil. Perhaps more eager now than before._

"Non serviam," I hissed, succinctly.

…_You favor Latin, it seems._

Something about his words filled me with bizarre unease. They seemed portentous, and not unfamiliar, as if I'd forgotten something very significant about the future, as laid out to me in fever dreams.

_No more mothers, Vergil. I have a far better thought in mind. _

Tricia struggled into the resulting pause, her knees still weak, her smile astronomically, hectically bright.

"Don't mind him," she murmured, touching my face. "It will be all right."

I drew back, giving her a look.

_You may choose to reject her acquaintance, Vergil. But I will keep her on._

"She is not my mother. I have no affinity."

_Even if she is not your mother, she will suffer as if she were._

"Let her angst." I regarded her through arctic eyes. "I want no part of it."

I lied, for I realized even then that I held no particular ill will toward Tricia, who was the unfortunate and clueless culmination of Mundus' alchemy in flesh. She seemed as much a prisoner as I, called into being for only one purpose, and once deprived of it, left to exist aimlessly and without boundary.

Neither did it escape my attention, brother, that her innate devotion would likely serve me well. It was reasonable to assume that should an opportune moment arise, her loyalties would ultimately lie with me, overriding those of Mundus.

_It will not be long in coming, Son of Sparda. I leave you, to return._

"He's gone," Tricia said, hesitantly, and she was right. Mundus was absent, at least. I was not at all certain he could ever be gone in a world where he was nearly ubiquitous.

I turned to her.

"Listen to me. I have no ill will toward you, but you must understand that what you feel is not organic."

She nodded slowly, waiting for more.

"I am not your son," I continued, and rubbed my temples, feeling the siren call of an impending headache. I sighed. "In any case, what I did to you-"

"I liked it," she said, bluntly.

"Yes," I muttered. "I know that."

"You didn't like it?"

She looked genuinely curious.

"It was fine," I told her, calmly. "But that will not happen again, not between us."

Tricia seemed to be thinking. Her glance settled boldly on my loins.

"What was it?" she asked. "When you…"

"Sex," I told her. "Which was not part of Mundus' plan."

"Mundus doesn't like sex?"

I raised my eyebrows.

"That I really couldn't say," I replied obscurely.

"You like sex."

"…Yes."

"But not with me."

I was silent.

"There's someone else," she said, with a moment of uncanny insight, and I wondered, brother, for half a moment, if she actually had inherited some form of maternal intuition.

I frowned, though she could not see it, brother, angled as she was.

"Mundus made a miscalculation. We're both lucky in that regard."

Tricia studied my profile. I could feel her eyes growing ever more sentient.

"Very well, Vergil. I understand."

I know that her instincts never truly changed. The nurturing impulse was still there, unnamed and urgent, and sometimes it would not be denied.

In the uneasy few days before Mundus enacted his final vengeance, I would spend my nights in the flawless prison he had recreated, forcing my mind to detach from the direness of my predicament- and from thoughts of you, o my brother, brash and carefree out in the world of mortals.

On one such blue evening, I was reading a book I had found in one of the neglected libraries, refreshing my slipped grasp of provincial demonic script, when I heard her come into the room.

"I know I'm not your mother," she began, and I saw that her hands trembled.

There was something she knew, or suspected. I was not surprised that something was imminent. Something is always imminent, o my brother, I suppose, and I had certainly invited Mundus' wrath in a hundred ways, not least of which by merely being who I was.

"Please, Vergil," she said, almost sobbing. "Can I hold you?"

I said nothing, but I let her sit down on my bed, and pull my head into her lap.

She calmed at once, as her fingers touched my brow.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered. "I can't help it."

There was silence as she stroked my hair.

"It's nothing," I said. "We are what we are."

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	2. Chapter 2

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_**Chapter II.**_

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Mundus relented in the end- and by that I do not mean he showed me mercy, Brother- but rather that he decided to take a shortcut to my compliance. It was far less of a coup to bend my will through the use of his powers, but he was eventually forced to abandon his hope of securing my willing allegiance. My youthful arrogance served me well- I won out over him.

And I lost, spectacularly.

He broke me into pieces, like the stars, and remade me in a shell.

_**You are no longer a Son of Sparda. You are my son now, and I will name you.**_

_**Neroangelo. **_

_**Speak, and know yourself.**_

I remember nothing after that moment.

Or nearly nothing. There is one memory, Dante, that does not elude my recollection. Perhaps it would be better if it did. In the days since my renaissance, I've often thought that if I could, I would lose it forever in the nether-reaches of my more Siberian psyche, simply abandon it on the icy steppes.

If I could forget, brother, I could justifiably disbelieve my past, and blithely dismiss my tenure as Mundus' black angel. But I am never blithe, Dante, as we both know full well- as you always delighted in reminding me.

So I keep it in mind.

It is a single moment, a mere vignette in twenty lost years, but it is all that remains to me of Nero Angelo. When I served Mundus, Tricia served him as well; I to his left and she to his right. The temple of his devotion was white, and he towered over all.

His expression was fixed, his eyes gazed forward, for he had no need to turn his head.

_**Neroangelo.**_

"Vergil," Tricia whispered. "Mundus wants your attention."

For she persisted in calling me this name that did not describe me, and though I did respond to it, I did not recognize it; neither did I ask her why she persevered.

I said nothing, for in those days I rarely spoke.

Mundus sat motionless upon his throne, doing an unconvincing impression of a harmless statue.

His arm was outstretched; his upright hand was vast and white.

In his palm was a mirror. In the mirror was a man.

I did not know him.

"Look Vergil," intoned Tricia. "Look hard."

His coat was red, his eyes were cold. He was standing in a courtyard, over the body of a shadowy beast, his piercing gaze upcast and fixed upon the sky. The grass was crushed and wet with blood.

For some reason my attention was drawn to the neglected fountain.

"You don't know him?" she asked, obscurely, once more. "Not at all?"

I shook my head, and there was a silence.

"Do you?" I asked, slowly, and she looked surprised. "Know him?"

She nodded hesitantly.

"Yes. We've met."

"I don't know him," I said.

_**Nero Angelo, behold your adversary.**_

The image shifted, and now this same man was standing in a bedroom, a room that I remembered. He was looking around, as if something had captured his attention strangely. He caught sight of the mirror and stared into the glass, and now I could see his face at greater vantage.

I cocked my head to better regard him.

"Mundus will want you to kill him," Tricia said, taking my arm. Her hand I could not feel. And then she told me his name.

I frowned, for I knew her tone had meaning beyond what was said. I was underwater and grasping for words that were spoken on shore.

I looked again at the man Mundus had put before me. He was still gazing into the glass, as if scrying for insight in its depths

"He is vain," I said.

Tricia looked up, suddenly.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, he is."

"I like his looks," I said, and when she turned to me once more, I had taken them on.

She stared, and did not speak again.

"He will appreciate this," I said. "Even if he must die."

You would know the story from there, o my brother, far better than I.

If my history as the Black Angel is so much shattered china, then that is the largest piece. Other little shards and fragments exist, and periodically they dig their way free of my mind, like emerging shrapnel- but by itself each is inconsequential. Even taken together they do not amount to much.

The corrupted psyche, irretrievable. The vase that is in too many pieces to glue.

But I remember you.

Yes, Dante, I _can _remember.

And sometimes, I do.

Not everything, not all things- but sometimes when I am standing alone in a desolate place, I will let myself look over the pieces of our history, disjointed and disparate, and try to reconcile a truth from the ruin.

"Give no thought to the world of mortals", is what Romani wrote in _La Sonnambula._

I often say it aloud, as if I might persuade myself toward such restraint. I have said it just now, standing on this isolated outcrop, beneath the Technicolor sky of the demon world.

A compelling turn of phrase, and sound advice in any case. Particularly sound advice for a disenfranchised devil prince.

Romani must not be blamed that my thoughts turn always back to you.

Dante, the son of my mother and father. The firebrand, the upstart. Joker to my jack. How is it that you exist, there, without me? Or I here, without you? It seems to defy all the laws of our world, which admittedly was not the mortal world, or the demon world, but some diaphanous between.

The reassuring weight of Mother's amulet upon my chest was once enough to evoke your presence, regardless of how far apart we strayed, or estranged. Now I feel the phantom ache of your absence, o my brother, in the empty space around my neck.

Among other places.

My mind mirrors the landscape of the netherworld, o my brother, a juxtaposition of exquisite vistas and savage terrain. When I open the gate, I see devastation and perfection, side by side in uncanny symbiosis. I seek your footsteps in the pristine snow. I search for you among the rubble.

Oddly enough, it is not our last meeting that I find intact; that is at best a shadow play that I can make little of, maddeningly dim around the edges, faded and overexposed in the most crucial moments.

Beneath the charred and buckling planks of Nero Angelo's influence, there is untouched winter. Cold storage for memories. Here I find my arctic refuge as I left it, locked down tight, preserving all in a kiss-soft blanket of frost. The theater of our history stands silent and solemn in the midst of it all, a temple to dysfunctional passion.  
I turn further into the wings of my mind's proscenium, and step beneath the arch- and here, at last, I behold a spotlight upon the house that we grew up in. It is that time that comes so vividly to me now, as I bide my time in purgatory.

But not just any time, Dante.

The first time.


	3. Chapter 3

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Chapter III.**_

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It was deep October, in the autumn of our true eighteenth year, before Father's dear, dark blood kicked in and stopped the clock. We have no chronology past that, o my brother, as you well know. The years ceased to leave any watermark, and our days became immeasurable.

Now we are as fixed and constant as the stars.

But once, we were still unfixed- mutable as water, physically malleable. Growing, my brother, like thistles in a tulip field.

Either way, it was all the same to Mother.

Mother had a softness about her, didn't she?

She smelled of Chanel no. 5, and her eyes were the darkest, most mundane brown- the kind that trumps every round of genetic roulette- unless, of course, you are up against Daddy's goods.

But what I remember most is that softness, and how I always indulged it, even though I have not, to this day, understood it.

You might have understood it better, my brother. I suspect it lives in you too, despite your vigor. Perhaps that is why I never could deny you, as much as my nature might have wished to do so.

Eva. Wife of a displaced devil. Mother of the star-crossed twins.

I find it almost quaint, somehow.

She came upon me, once, in the study of our great house, as I sat reading a book of unnatural history, for I was already suspicious of our origin. It had not occurred to you, I know, that there was anything unusual about us, not in a concrete way, at least. In defense of your idiot oblivion, we had been sheltered from greater humanity, in the classic sense of the comfortably wealthy- private tutors, maids, a houseman- but the servants were odd and unobtrusive, and the tutors were most certainly from out of town, o my brother, if you get my drift.

While we had been raised in complete awareness of otherworldly things, Father's affinity had never been completely explained to us. When we were younger, my assumption had always been that it was no different than any other job- if one's father were a zookeeper, he would spend time among tigers. It wouldn't occur to you to ask if he was a tiger himself.

But I began to wonder, brother, around the time I learned the Twelve Fallacies of Logic from a talking octopus, whether my analogy had in fact been entirely misapplied.

Perhaps, I reasoned, it was less an occupation, and more an affiliation.  
Perhaps, Dante, it was less like the zoo, and more like the mafia.

One might reasonably assume that a man who works with tigers is not a tiger, but it's difficult to make the same statement about a man who works with organized criminals- especially if he shared many of the attributes and abilities of his associates.

Further proof, o my brother, that in my original assumption, I had committed the sin of False Analogy. Even if a man who tends tigers eats raw meat and licks his own ass, you wouldn't call him a tiger. You'd call the whitecoats.

There were things about you and I that supported the notion that Mother had committed some sins as well- namely the sin of omission. These things were many and legion, and _inhuman_ by definition.

Naturally, you took them all at face value.

But I had been thinking, and my thinking blooms outward like a clambering rose, twining and encompassing. Seeking chinks in which to insinuate sly tendrils; seeking to pull down walls.

The most elementary survey of anthropology confirmed it- human physiology simply did not allow for us, Dante.

"I brought you some coffee." Eva's hand was light upon my shoulder. "I thought you could use some. It's getting cold outside."

"Thank you," I said, absently, as she set a tray on the end table. It held a French press and two cups, a pitcher of cream and a bowl of raw sugar.

"…Mother," I added, belatedly, looking up from my reading.

She was wearing a red dress, and her hair was piled carelessly atop her head like dark, tarnished gold, upswept and pinned with decorative combs.

My gaze traveled to her hands as she poured the coffee.

"Two cups?" I asked, pleasantly.

She smiled.

"Mind if I join you?"

"If you like," I said vaguely.

"Vergil-" she began, hesitantly.

"Something on your mind, Eva?" I asked, before I could remind myself to call her Mother. I was very deliberate about invoking the term, as a general rule, for it didn't come naturally to me.

She tapped her nails against the sides of her coffee cup, looking thoughtful, and biting her lip. Then she glanced up, tilting her head.

"Have you noticed…something _off _about Dante?"

I raised an eyebrow.

Mother smiled.

"Vergil," she admonished. "I mean lately. He's been…odd. This whole week."

I said nothing, but sipped my coffee, giving her a noncommittal look.

She pushed the cream toward me.

"Something is bothering him. Whatever it is, it's as if he can't stop thinking about it. He stares off into space."

"Maybe he has undiagnosed minor epilepsy," I suggested dryly. "Petit mal seizures can be almost indistinguishable from actual introspective thought."

Eva rolled her eyes tolerantly.

"Dante is not epileptic. He's preoccupied. Don't think I don't know what introverted brooding looks like on that face," she added, touching my nose, with impunity only a mother would dare to invoke.

I smirked briefly, stirring my coffee with a ludicrously small spoon that earned my instantaneous disdain.

"And yet you never worry about me."  
"It isn't like him, Vergil."

"What isn't like him? Thinking? Listen to yourself. Ever hear of a self-fulfilling prophecy, Mother?"

Eva studied me for a moment, finally sighing, and setting down her cup with an indulgent smile.

"I'm sorry, Vergil. I suppose you wouldn't really notice. After all, you hardly acknowledge him."

There was wistful remorse in her tone, and something else that sounded almost like guilt, o my brother, if my ears did not deceive me.

My eyes narrowed.

"Dante is a mouth-breather. I hardly think it deserves much analysis. Unless there's something else I've failed to notice."

Our mother hesitated, toying with the chain around her neck, and I saw the depths of her concern for you, like a lambent haze from the corner of my eye.

"He's never this quiet. It's been more than a week."

"Almost a week," I remonstrated, in absent annoyance, because it was just like Eva to exaggerate the facts to make a point, and I was in no mood for motherly hyperbole.

When I looked up again, she was staring at me.

"What?" I demanded.

"You didnotice."

I said nothing, but took another sip of coffee, eyeing her insouciantly.

She leaned forward.

"Then you know that he's been watching _you_, Vergil."

I wasn't surprised that she'd noticed. Your eyes had been inescapable these past five days. You were not exactly subtle, Dante, in your scrutiny.

There was a significant pause, where Eva searched my face for signs with little success.

"Was it a fight?"

"Do you know, there _was_ a fight, Mother," I told her dryly. "It's been going on since the day we were born."

"No, it's something else." She shook her head. "You must know something, Vergil. I've never seen him act like that."

I looked at her for some time. When I finally spoke, my voice had cooled by several degrees.

"Believe me when I tell you, I've no insight as to what he's thinking."

It was true, brother; I suspected I knew the genesis of your thoughts, but not what direction they had taken. The stare you'd been leveling in my direction was enigmatic and intense, yes, but hardly telling. Your eyes were unreadable, almost distant. They held no overt hostility, but all the same, the constant assessment was unsettling.

Eva poured me a second cup without asking, and I obligingly doctored it to my taste.

"You could talk to him, Vergil."

"Why would I do that?" I asked.

"He needs you."

"Dante needs nothing." I took up my book once more.

Eva's voice was quiet.

"You're wrong, Vergil. His whole life, he's been chasing your shadow, as you slip away from him."

I frowned, looking at her skeptically.

"That's a little dramatic, isn't it?"

She was staring at me.

"You're so much like your father," she whispered.

Her hand covered mine, tentatively, as if she was unsure I would welcome it. Although her intentions were no doubt sincere, I took umbrage at the gesture, the implication that I might become hostile at a touch.

"And Dante?" I demanded, narrowing my eyes.

"Dante is more like me," she said.

"He is nothing like you."

"Don't you see it? He loves you so much. Yet you give him so little."

I was silent, my lips pressed together. The tick of the mantel clock above my head was somehow both monotonous and unsynchronized, but undeniably present.

"Please, Vergil. Please. Go to him."

"You don't know what you're asking," I told her, beneath my breath.

I moved to run my hand back over my brow, and she abruptly withdrew her fingers from where they rested atop my own, knocking over the French press in her haste.

It hit the bone colored marble with a rather unsatisfying sound, scattering thin glass in all directions. The steel-ribbed exoskeleton of the frame lay awkwardly in a streak of black coffee, looking like a primordial fossil rising out of a tar pit.

"Oh, shit," Eva muttered, "Look what I just did."

She got up immediately, and began to pick up the shattered glass with bare fingers.

"Leave it," I told her, bemused. "The maid will get it."

She sighed, standing up.

"That's most of it, anyway."

I shook my head, eyeing the stacked glass in her palm.

"Honestly, I don't know why you even keep the help around, if you insist on cleaning up every mishap yourself."

Eva shrugged.

"It was nothing," she said brightly, but I had not forgotten that she had reacted when I moved, jerking her hand away as if a cobra had suddenly danced out of the cream pitcher. "Really darling, just hand me that napkin."

My eyes narrowed.

"Mother. You're bleeding."

"Oh!"

She looked down, at the trickle of scarlet that painted the cup of her palm, smearing onto the shards in a translucent glaze.

"You're right. I cut myself," she said, dismayed. "Right across the middle."

She dropped the handful of glass gingerly onto the silver tea-service. I deftly covered it with a fine white napkin.

"You'd better sit down," I told her, raising an eyebrow.

I handed her another napkin, and she wrapped it around the wound, smiling.

"Thank you. It isn't as bad as it looks."

"No? I'm glad. After all, you need to be careful, don't you?" I leaned slowly back in my chair, watching her as she dutifully applied pressure, her initial shock having subsided. Small red roses bloomed through the white linen, astoundingly clarion.

I felt my lips tighten.

"I should get you…a band-aid, shouldn't I? Maybe some disinfectant. But the thing is, Mother-" I paused, tilting my head significantly. "I've never seen any. I wouldn't even know where to look for such a thing."

Eva glanced up, and I knew I'd struck a chord.

"I'm fine," she said, resolutely. "Don't worry about me, sweetheart. I've got mom hands."

I smiled coolly, picking up a piece of broken glass from the tray in front of me and rolling it nonchalantly between my fingertips.

"Really. In that case, I must have Father's hands."

Eva smiled absently.

"How so?"

I sighed.

"You force me to demonstrate, even as Dante does, every time. To force you into admitting what you already know to be true. Clearly you are every bit his mother. Watch now."

I kept my gaze locked to hers as I held up the jagged glass for illustration, along with my unblemished palm. Without hesitation I drew the edge along my flesh, causing Eva to cry out instinctively.

She realized quickly enough that there was no cause for alarm, despite her first impulse. Her mouth closed and she looked at me uneasily.

I inspected my work. The cut was far worse than hers.

"You know, this would almost certainly require stitches," I remarked, mildly. "But it won't, will it?"

She hardly needed to reply; she could see and I could see that it was already healing, drawing inward on itself until little remained but a thin and nonspecific line.

A few more seconds and there was nothing at all. I ran my index finger across it, as if checking for dust.

"Good as new. I find that odd, Mother."

Eva was looking at the table. She unwound the linen from her hand and set it aside.

"Don't ever do that again," she said, in a low voice. "It's hard enough watching you tear each other apart."

"I wouldn't have done it at all, but you persisted in humoring me."

I could hear the ice that coated my tone. I returned to my book, opening it absently to the page that I had marked with an untidy dog-ear, a solitary quirk of mine that would almost seem more suited to you, Brother, if indeed you actually read books.

Eva was quiet for a minute or so.

"I don't know what to tell you, Vergil," she said, at last.

"What is there to know?" I replied succinctly, turning a page and following it down with eyes that had long ceased to read and comprehend. "Tell me why it is that Dante and I defy every natural law, while you, our mother, require bactine and time like everyone else."

She shook her head, her dark eyes shining like mica, and I found them almost pretty, in that moment, though nothing like mine.

Or yours.

"You already know, Vergil. You've realized. You're not like everyone else."

I paused, and closed the book with a sharp, soft clap.

"Yes," I punctuated. "I had entertained that thought, Mother."

I set the weighty edition down on the sideboard, careful not to disrupt the equilibrium of the elaborate Chinese vase that stood sentinel there. A gift, she had told us, from our father, who had fought in the East.

Which revealed exactly nothing.

"Call it intuition," I added, coolly.

"_Aberrants, Deviants and Anomalies_," she read, gazing at the cover of the book I had discarded. "What on earth are you doing with that?"

"I had thought I might find a taxonomy in which to fit myself and my brother," I told her blithely. "Or better yet, diagrams of an adpressed dissection."

She shuddered, and managed a feeble smile.

"God, I hope not."

"I expect you'd prefer it," I remarked, dryly. "It would save me the trouble of carving up Dante in the name of science."

She couldn't help but betray a glimpse of an actual smile at that, and I leaned back in my chair, chin tipped upward, regarding her.

"Well, Mother? I'm waiting."

Poor Eva. I don't envy her position, with the benefit of all that I know now. But I was young, and wanted everything.

"Your father was a devil," she said, slowly.

I frowned.

"I don't suppose you're being metaphorical."

"No."

Had I not been so implacable, o my brother, I might have choked. Instead, I cocked my head and raised a brow with excruciating leisure.

"Remarkable," I drawled. "At last we're getting somewhere."

I was surprised again when Eva reached out, brushing a jagged slip of ivory hair back from my face. She shook her head fondly, and I felt like turning away from the obvious affection in her eyes.

"Nothing fazes you, does it, Vergil? Sometimes I swear you have liquid nitrogen in your veins."

"I think you'll have to take responsibility for any deviations from the biological norm, _Rosemary_," I retorted absently.

In truth I was utterly stunned.

Not by the revelation, but by the ease with which it came to light.

I don't know what I expected- more reticence, perhaps, as she'd always been so enigmatic about the subject- or perhaps I merely anticipated the prospect of more coercion on my end. In any case, I had not prepared for this.

Eva waited in silence for a moment, then looked carefully at her hands, which lay in her lap.

"Have you nothing to say, Vergil?"

"Well done, Mother," I said reluctantly, my eyebrows aloft. "I'm impressed."

Eva smiled faintly.

"Now you know what your father was. What I am."

My eyes narrowed.

"And where exactly does that leave me and my idiot twin?"

Eva looked up, and fixed her gaze on my own.

"Alone together."

I felt an odd chill course through me at those words, uttered so artlessly.

It was nothing less than an epiphany, o my brother, to absorb the universal truth contained in those spare syllables.

"Forgive me," I murmured obscurely, abstracted and preoccupied, glancing to the side with eyes that saw nothing, inward-turned as they were. "It never struck me."

Perhaps not, but it struck me now, Dante, to my basest primal core, and even as she said it, I realized I should have been aware, should have known by instinct what I now drew from inference.  
How in all existence, my brother, there were no others forged as I was. None but you.

I steepled my fingers, and rested my chin upon them, consumed by unanswerable questions. What did it mean to be a confirmed half-devil? Some things we knew by trial and error, such as the fact that we merrily recovered from mortal wounds. Others, I recognized purely by common sense and comparison- using Mother as a litmus, it was clearly unnatural to be able to move as fast, or jump as high as we could, brother.

Was that all? Or were there unseen inheritances yet to emerge?

"Father never talked to me about this part of adolescence," I muttered.

"He couldn't know any more than you or I," Eva replied, reasonably. "There's no precedent for this kind of thing." She sighed. "At least you know what you are, now. That's something."

"We know what we are, but not what we'll become."

Scratch that, Dante. You knew nothing, and seemed to like it that way.

Eva looked amused, all of a sudden.

"Que sera, sera," she answered, with a rueful smile. "Isn't that what the mother is supposed to say?"

"If this were a musical."

"If this were a musical, you'd be half-angels," our Mother pointed out.

"That cut healed yet?" I asked her, smirking.

She rolled her eyes tolerantly.

"No, but my middle finger is in perfect health."

"Indeed it is."

It was, o my brother.

Mother paused then, and somehow that odd look was back on her face, the one that looked suspiciously like an inextricable morass of guilt and regret.

"While I'm making confessions…"

"What is it now?" I sighed. "Don't tell me. You used to be an exotic dancer? My brother was born with his brain inverted?"

"Vergil-" she began.

"I'm listening."

"What you said earlier," she said, hesitantly. "About you and Dante…being at odds since birth."

"Our bitter rivalry?" I asked, pleasantly, looking up.

She looked pained, but regardless, she pressed on.

"It isn't true, Vergil. In fact, it's almost completely the opposite."

My eyes narrowed.

"What do you mean?"

Our Mother took a very deep breath.

"From the moment you were born, there was never anyone else in the world that could hold your attention. And it was the same for him."

I'm sure I looked askance at that, but she was studiously avoiding my gaze.

"Neither of you would sleep without touching some part of the other one. As an infant, Dante would shriek like nothing I've ever heard if I picked you up and took you where he couldn't see you. You would frown at me. When I put you back down, you would just look at him solemnly and he would be content again, babbling like he hadn't seen you in twenty years."  
I was silent, regarding her, so she nodded and continued.

"You were incredibly close. Too close, I thought, but your father told me that such a bond was not only natural, but desirable in the demon world. He called it an organic safeguard." She smiled, remembering. "He told me I was looking at it from a humanocentric perspective. 'Think it over, and you'll see,' he said, 'you wouldn't want such powers at odds.' Sparda was unconcerned about anything but preparing you both for your legacy. He felt it was the only atonement he could make for leaving such a heavy burden in the first place."

Eva looked down for a moment.

"It gets harder from here."

"Go on, Mother. I insist."

"As you grew, your attachment grew, and with it came a new kind of physical expression. At about five, you developed an affectionate little rivalry. Sparda was thrilled with you both- tiny and ferocious and utterly devoted to each other. But I-"

She bit her lip.

"God, I don't want to say this."

"Say it," I said, quietly.

"I was never convinced that it was normal for you and Dante to be so possessive of each other, so intense…so…obviously enamored, despite what your father said. So when this competitive dynamic emerged…I encouraged it."

I felt a sting of something, deep inside me.

"…Encouraged?"

"I don't know what I was thinking."

She put her face in her hands, and I began to become alarmed.

"I'm sure it has nothing to do with that," I told her, bloodlessly.

"Oh, it does, Vergil. It does. I urged you toward hostility, and reinforced you for challenging each other. Oh, it absolutely does. It only got worse with your father gone."

She looked up, and her eyes glittered with the threat of rain.

I cannot rationalize my reaction, brother.

Tears have always disquieted me in ways I cannot define to a point or confine to a reason. Perhaps because tears are so rare to us.

A devil's tears take oceans of anguish to produce. Humans spill them like so much meaningless glitter.

Still, I was aghast at the thought of Mother crying, to such an extent that it took precedence over what she had just told me.

"Don't," I told her abruptly. "It isn't worth it."

She looked at me, stunned.

"It was nothing Mother," I said, tonelessly. "Nothing at all."

"I need you to understand what I did, Vergil."

Though she looked stricken and confused, she no longer looked like she was going to cry, and I felt a palpable sense of relief engulf me.

I exhaled imperceptibly, and straightened my jacket cuffs with a minimal, effective gesture, favoring her with a smirk.

"Dr. Spock authored no books on raising hell-spawn, Mother," I said dismissively. "As you said, there was no precedent."

Eva shook her head. Her smile was bitter.

"Only now do I realize how very right your father was."

She stood up, and walked to the window.

"I should have listened," she said, without turning around.

"Truly, Mother, I don't think it would affect the price of tea in China," I said with cool dispassion, returning to the pages of my book.

I resumed my reading, although it had been rendered largely an exercise in futility, not to put too fine a point on it. Still, I knew not what else to do in that moment, and it seemed like enough.

Eva could have done any number of things at that point, but she did none of them.

She lingered, straightening the flowers in the vast amphora by the chaise.

"Eva," I drawled, at last, unable to concentrate. "I can't help but notice you're still here."

"Vergil," she said softly. "Look at me."

She held my gaze, steadfast and unwavering, as she pulled a single long-stemmed flower from the variegated collective.

It was a lily of some kind, or perhaps a trumpet flower. I was unacquainted with its name. Flowers barely entered my mind as things to be realized, except as brilliant charms to ward off the austere chill of vaulted rooms.

I hardly noticed them in the sprawling gardens where I trained, relentlessly, at combat.

She held it up before me, straight and pristine in its verdant stem.

"My life is little more than this, compared to yours. I'm going to die, Vergil."

"Mother—" I moved to interject, but she pushed her fingers against my lips, firmly.

"That time will come, and sooner than you think."

I narrowed my eyes.

"And what do you want from me?"

Despite my unfeeling tone, my hand trembled beneath her own.

"Promise me, Vergil. You'll protect him."

I closed my eyes.

"Don't push him away. Let him love you."

"Are you finished?" I asked, my voice thick; honeyed grit.

"Will you promise?" She hissed, and I saw that for all her softness, mother held a steely soul in reserve. She would have needed it, for Father was no shrinking violet.

I opened my eyes and fixed them upon her, knowing they were icy and resolute.

"You never needed to ask."

"I never doubted you, Vergil," she whispered, kissing my cheek.

Her lips were humanly mild, semi-warm. They had always felt strange to me, as someone who welcomes extremes.

When she had gone, I took the abandoned flower and pressed it deep within the pages of the book I no longer had any desire to read.

Mother only wanted me to accept your love.

Mother could not have known what she asked of me.

Mother could not have known of the nature within us that I already suspected. Mother knew nothing of devils, save that she wed one, and let him make her gravid with luminous infants, who came smooth and bright-eyed from the womb, and looked up at her in complete cognizance.

Mother could not have known of a kiss between brothers, beneath a thin red moon, not a week before.

I knew all this and more.

* * *


	4. Chapter 4

_**

* * *

Chapter IV.**_

* * *

You and I have an unhealthy history by human standards.

When we were seven, we played at croquet, and you tried to separate my head from my shoulders with the blunt side of a mallet after I deliberately struck your ball from the course.

I was a mercenary competitor, and you had a wicked temper. You tried valiantly to assassinate me that day, but alas, I too could wield a mallet, and all thoughts of the game were quickly forgotten in favor of bludgeoning one another with impunity.

It was Father who tore us apart, laughing as he did so. It was nothing for him to do it- just a finger beneath our collars, and we were suspended neatly. You spat and wriggled in his clutch like an infant pirhana.

I remember glancing over and waving to mother. She looked pale.

We discovered that we were unable to kill each other a long time ago. We did not find it odd and it quickly became a part of the scenery.

When Father was gone, our grieving Mother dutifully respected his wishes and doled out his keepsakes- a sword for you, and a sword for me.

After that, croquet was all but abandoned in favor of our new game, the one that we have never outgrown.

There was a pleasure in our fighting, o my brother, a very dark and unspeakable pleasure that I know you have never articulated to a living soul- or a damned one, for that matter.

No, Dante, that is a perverse little secret held purely between us. Others may well guess by watching, but they cannot know the extent of the shudder-inducing bouts that left us weak and spent, locked in sweet, vicious conflict until I would either give quarter or take you out of the game- for I was always the superior swordsman, despite your tenacity.

Yes, we were always up for a fight.

So it was business as usual on that memorable night, almost a week before poor Eva found me in the library.

That crisp October evening found us squaring off in the neglected courtyard at the edge of the garden. You had found me, as you often did, honing Yamato in the empty carriage house, and dragged me outside to spar with you.

"Wanna test that edge, bro?" you asked nonchalantly, hovering in the doorway.

I looked up, and frowned. You raised your eyebrows questioningly, giving Rebellion a lazy swing so that the sword's tip pointed at me. A playful smile crept onto your lips.

I glanced back down at Yamato, running my finger slowly along the blade. It slid into the flesh like water.

"Why not," I said, after a moment.

I followed you outside, into the fading autumn twilight, eyeing the indolent sway of your shoulders with wry amusement. Everything about you smacked of bravado in those days.

"I think that sword could have used a few more passes, bro," you declared, smirking. You didn't even draw blood when you cut yourself."

"You're an idiot," I informed you, coolly.

That was the beauty of the taichi, after all, brother. Any wounds it inflicted were so clean and instantaneous, they took several seconds to bleed. In the case of my hand, devil healing had already kicked in. Yamato was sharp as a slicing wire, make no mistake. But I felt no need to explain to you what I could accomplish with a demonstration.

Words were always wasted on you anyway.

Here the stones were barren beneath our feet, sparkling with a dry dusting of frost. Ivy had eschewed the courtyard walls in favor of the woods beyond, and vast cracks ran along the masonry, like rivers in miniature.

For lack of a gardener's love, the topiary was growing unchecked. I was amused to see that a preciously begging dog in the corner seemed to have developed three heads.

You came at me without preamble, your red coat flapping in the chill air like a war banner. I did not elude you quickly enough and felt Rebellion's familiar steel kiss my side, just below the ribs, and the warmth of the blood that followed.

Undaunted, I reversed your attack and drove you into a series of acrobatic evasions, always just beyond the point of my well-loved Yamato, who sang joyfully as she slashed the air, as if she were happy to be freed once more from the confines of her gilded home upon my hip.

You escaped, I'll admit, in a novel enough fashion, lithely leaping up to stand upon the shoulders of a statue of Atlas, so that now he held your considerable weight, as well as that of the world.

An aerial attack was natural from your vantage, and you were ever a devotee of Occam's Razor, brother, despite having no idea what it was, so I was not disappointed in my expectations. You came slashing downward, and I sidestepped, countering, as your sword struck the flagstones with a ragged clanging. It reverberated across the empty expanse, sending a flock of doves hurtling into the air from some hidden alcove.

The loud rustling of their wings did not distract me, for I was fixed upon my purpose, but you caught sight of them behind me, and for the scarcest of moments, you were captivated. I could hardly blame you; I'm sure the picture they made, white against the red hook moon, with the sky like a field of blue-dark velvet, was exquisite.

Unfortunately for you, o my brother, nothing is quite as exquisite as my swordsmanship.

I tipped my blade beneath your chin smartly, knocking you back.

Instinctively you felt beneath your jaw, glancing at your fingers.

"No blood," I affirmed, mildly.

It was a subtle demonstration that was not lost on you.

"Just a love tap, right Verge?"

Your voice was indolent and sardonic.

"Something like that."

"Nice little circus trick."

"Now I intended to take my circus in the opposite direction."

I slashed you twice, and well, painting the masonry with the vivid color of your blood. In its wide swath, it looked like light spilled from the hunter's moon above, and I was pleased with the artistry of it.

I wanted to remark upon that, but you were once more at my throat, so I reluctantly resumed my onslaught.

So it went for some time, o my brother, as it always did- each feeling the strike of the other's blade. Both of us relishing every blow, either thwarted or landed, for though it never was said, to us pleasure and pain were not entirely unacquainted.

Eventually I got the better of you, predictably, when you slipped up executing what Father called the "million stab" and overshot the target.

I sheathed Yamato despite her protests, without breaking stride, and delivered several merciless and concentrated kicks that sent you flying.

You fell hard against the weathered base of the courtyard's center fountain, crumpling in a jagged heap of crimson. I followed at a leisurely stride, keeping my eyes on your struggling form.

And truly, Dante, you were already regrouping. Think what you want of me, brother- I have always admired your fortitude.

I redrew my taichi and pressed its point to your throat before you could rally.

"_Fiat_," I intoned. "_Factum est_. It is done."

There was a pause.

"_Cedo maiori_," you replied sullenly, and I marveled, as always, at the way you could turn plain Latin into colorful expletives purely by nuance.

Though you said the appropriate words, I doubted very much you meant them. You honored Father's instruction, and for that I could not fault you. Yet I disliked hearing the requisite phrase from your lips, somehow, and always had. Somehow it always left the golden cup tainted with a bittersweet patina, and I could not fully enjoy my success.

_I yield to one greater_ was hardly a sentiment you endorsed. One but needed to look you in the eyes to know that.

Make no mistake; I relished my victories. I merely disliked having them sullied by disingenuous rote recitals of code.

"You don't mean that," I said, in a low voice. "Don't speak empty words."

"It's the procedure," you retorted, tightly. "I thought you lived for these little rituals."

"It's perjury. There's no honor in that."

You glared.

"Who's here to arrest me? The insincerity police?"

"Father always taught us to fight with honor," I reminded you, coolly. I reached out, offering to help you rise.

"Screw your hand."

Latin niceties dispensed with, you were back in form.

"As the victor, it's my right to be magnanimous."

You sighed, looking frustrated, and ran your hand through your disheveled hair.

"Fine."

Your palm slapped into mine with more anger than enthusiasm.

I hauled you upright, with the assistance of your taut physicality, and now we both stood, before the cracked dry fountain, in a courtyard that swirled with leaves.

"Thanks, bro," you sneered, facetiously.

"Think nothing of it," I returned, with an icy smile.

"Don't worry. I won't."

We had yet to release each other's hands, holding fast with a grudge that was rapidly becoming a death grip.

"I'm remembering one of dear old dad's other adages," you spat, your pale hair whipped across your face in artful strands, like corn silk after a storm.

"Really. Do share."

" 'Don't rejoice when your enemy falls-' "

" 'But don't pick him up either' ," I finished, with a grim smile.

"So you know it."

Your gaze was accusatory, almost smug, as if you knew you'd proved that I was remiss in my teachings. You looked unusually good when you were being spiteful, for reasons always lost to me.

"I know it," I replied, calmly. Our hands were still clenched tightly, and you showed no signs of letting go. It seemed the only thing to do to break the impasse was to pull you forward and off your guard.

I did so, abruptly, and you pitched, catching yourself up just short of my face. I met your furious gaze.

"But you," I said quietly, "are not my enemy."

Your breath was ragged in the chill air.

You hesitated, locking onto my eyes with your own and searching them voraciously- for something, I knew not what. I frowned, mildly displeased that I was unable to read your intentions, o my brother.

Too late it dawned on me.

The hatred in your gaze seemed brittle, for once- fallible- only to re-brighten yet again as you failed to find what you sought.

The intention no longer escaped me, for it was a familiarly bred contempt.

All at once, I knew the profoundest sense of loss. I cannot explain it any better than that. It was the bitterest kind of dispossession, o my brother- not the elementary kind born of merely losing what you've always had, but something infinitely more cruel- to forfeit what nearly was, what you held in the palm of your hand, but could not close your fingers over.

It pained me, o my brother, somewhere deep and primal.

It seems only natural, to grab for what is lost as it falls away from you, as if you might recapture it once more through sheer force of will.

_Sic volo, sic iubeo_. I want this, I demand this.

What is more reasonable than that? I asked myself as I reached out to seize the defiant curve of your jaw in the cradle of my palm, as I drew you forward.

As I pressed my lips against your unsuspecting mouth.

_Sic_.

Just so.

…Sic.

_Thus._

Your hand shot upward and clenched in my lapel, and I became aware, then, of how fiercely warm your mouth was upon my own, how insistent. If I had expected you to resist, o my brother, I was mistaken.

As with all things, you were immediately discontent- tantalized, and pushing for more, your hunger bewildering in its intensity, throwing me off my guard.

My hand stilled you, bracing against your chest, forcing you to pause, your brow resting against mine, breathing onto my lips in soft, rapid pulses.

And did my hand tremble ever so slightly? I think it did, brother, something it had never done in all my life.

I closed my eyes, backtracking, seeking to regain autonomy over myself. What had I said? Where had I left off?

"You," I repeated, slowly, "Are not my enemy."

Saying those words helped me regain my composure, and things snapped back into icy focus. You seemed to have recovered yours as well, but your face was unreadable.

"You're my brother," I said, "and that seems rather permanent." I shook off your fist. "So let it go."

For once you had nothing to say, although as I left you there in the silent courtyard, I half expected you to hurl a cocky rejoinder, a taunt, an incredulous demand. But none came.

I did not look back.

You did not follow.

We had not spoken since that evening, and Eva's misguided meeting of the minds upon ambushing me in the parlor was surely an intuitive maternal reaction.

It followed, of course; if the dauntless and indomitable Dante is behaving unlike himself, it must be squarely on the frostbitten shoulders of his icy brother.

Vergil, detached and dismissive, not given to affection. _Patris est filius_, after all; he is his Father's son.

If she were given one hundred years of solitude to contemplate every possible scenario, Eva would never arrive at the true conclusion- that perhaps I had given you a little too much affection.

The irony of that demanded appreciation.

I do know that Eva did not presume to suppress our demonic natures, short of keeping mum on pop, as it were. It must have been quite a task, brother, keeping two clueless young devils in some semblance of a line. Father might have guided her, had he but been there.

Indeed, I cannot think of a wilder oat to sow among flowers before leaving the field to the mercy of the weeds.

Eva, wife of Sparda, caretaker of the devil's orchard.

Would she have still have pleaded with me to go to you, had she known of that unguarded moment?

Would she have longed for us to cultivate our brotherly love, if she knew what form of expression it took?

Do you know, I cannot say.

* * *


	5. Chapter 5

_**

* * *

Chapter V.**_

* * *

I did go to you that night- you may remember it- though it was not my intention.

I found you, when the house was quiet, and the long shadows crept across the desolate ballroom from the great arched windows above.

As far as I know there had never been a ball there; mother had no interest in such archaic old-money affectations, and we accordingly used it as yet one more splendid place to spar, ripping each other's hearts out roundly across the parquet floor. The gorgeous Venetian marquetry was sadly scarred with evidence of our battles.

I should be honest, o my brother, and confess that despite Eva's impassioned floral allegory, I had no plan of seeking you when I quitted the library for the evening. I had promised all I meant to promise, and wanted no more discourse with anyone, least of all my hungry twin, who would as soon have me crucified as condoned.

And yet, when I was stripped and lying beneath the canopy of the immense bed, I could not tempt sleep. The bed itself could hardly be blamed- the linens were hand-embroidered by Carmelite nuns, the duvet and feather tick were balmy as cumulus clouds- but for all the world it felt like a desert, stifling in its openness. While I normally retreated to the embrace of those dark pillars with sensual relish, that night they felt listlessly stark.

Eventually I threw back the coverlet and found my robe, a generous and encompassing banyan of deep blue Asiatic silk, limned with gold embroidery.

It was not uncommon for me to wander the halls at ungodly hours, for indeed I often would, in those odd, awakening days. I could be found practicing my weapons technique at night, alone in the ballroom, with only the great pale moon outside the windows to light my endeavors. I found it gratifying, somehow, to be the only creature breathing in the solemn and reverent night.

Perhaps that is why I sought the ballroom that restless evening, despite having had no particular wish to take up a sword. It was a sanctuary of sorts, a cool haven that echoed my own thoughts, vast and dark and enduring.

Imagine my surprise, o my brother, upon finding my blissful sanctuary corrupted by the presence of none other than yourself.

You stood at the far end of the great room, idly gazing upward at the portrait of our dear departed daddy, still clad in your day clothes despite the late hour, your pale hair argent and luminous against the gloom.

You were unaware of me for far longer than you should have been, of course. I had gotten nearly halfway across the moonlit floor before you realized you were no longer alone.

You turned, then, without any particular haste.

"Yeah," you said. "I thought I'd find you here."

"You didn't find me here," I pointed out, mildly.

"Don't be a slave to the obvious, Vergil."

You rolled your eyes, but it did little to diminish the Sparda charms- you may thank Father for that.

The harvest moon was low and wide, heavy with light, and it seemed to hover just outside the glass, the color of tangerines and blood.

I let myself take dispassionate stock of you, resplendent in your ridiculously crimson coat, standing in the midst of the vast and barren dancehall.

The omnipresent Rebellion rested across your shoulders, and both arms draped over it. It occurred to me that I could have disemboweled you twice over before you could disengage from your indolent pose.

"What are you smiling about?" you asked.

"The price of tea in China," I said, vaguely.

You gave me an odd little smile in return.

"Never changes, does it?"

"Not much."

I was conscious of that restless feeling again.

You began to walk toward me, your leisurely swagger heightened and exaggerated by the vibrant shadows.

"Mother tells me I'm to pet your head," I informed you, coolly, as you approached.

"Really."

"She seems to think you're mentally disturbed."

"That's just heartwarming."

"Isn't it."

"Did Mother tell you to kiss me, as well?"

It was quiet, ever so quiet.

"I wouldn't have done it if she had," I said moderately.

You smirked.

"Fair enough."

I waited for you to ask me _why_ I had done it, as it seemed to be the next logical question, but heaven forbid anyone should ever accuse you of logic, o my brother.

Instead, you brandished your sword. Or should I say father's sword, which would have been far happier in more capable hands, but for mother's irritating predilection for evening the odds.

"Looking for a fight, I see," I observed, dryly.

"Are you offering?"

"I'm not exactly dressed for it." It was not exactly a no.

For the first time, you seemed to take notice of my state, although your eyes hadn't left me since I arrived.

"What exactly _are_ you dressed for?"

"Bed, actually," I told you archly. "The sleep of the just."

"A little overdressed for bed," you said. "At least the way I sleep."

As revelations go, this was hardly earth shattering.

I thought of your primal leanness, the mirror of mine, sprawled carelessly beneath pure, perfect bedclothes, and was amused to feel a tightening in my loins.

Your eyes traveled over me, as a sly grin crept over your lips.

"If you didn't come here to fight, Verge, what did you come for?"

I paused. It was a good question, in its way.

"Somnambulance eluded me."

I was rewarded with a healthy snorting noise from your misleadingly patrician face.

"In laymen's terms, Vergil."

"I couldn't sleep," I drawled, giving you a look.

"See how easy that was?"

"Cake-walking," I intoned. "Almost as easy as…"

"Say it. I want this to be on."

"…Winning."

You smiled.

"That does it, Vergil. You're mine."

I slowly crossed my arms, regarding you detachedly.

"I'm not going to fight you like this."

"So lose the robe." You shrugged, unconcerned.

I laughed, an icy sound, even to my own ears.

"I think not."

"It could work to your advantage. I might get distracted," you said, grinning cavalierly. "You're _almost_ as good-looking as I am."

"I'm not the one who could use an advantage."

I was now almost fully hard beneath the night-blue silk of my wrap.

It was not unusual for me to become aroused when we fought; carnal pleasures are consanguine, even as we are, o my brother. Often I would take myself in hand after the fact, with your blood still on my skin, and your sweat still heavy in my senses.

I could only assume the same of you, given the almost fetishistic glint that lit your eyes at the mere thought of facing me in combat.

"_That's_ it. You're dead, Vergil. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead."

"Does it assuage your own pain to see me bleed, Dante?" I asked, amused. "Is it like punching a mirror?"

"Something like that," you snarled. "Except that broken glass is actually dangerous."

"Ah, levity. Cream of wit. It's an unparalleled pleasure to hear you speak."

"Yeah? Well let me do you the unparalleled pleasure of beating you senseless."

You were blatantly hostile, now, no longer just antagonistic, and the pale blue of your eyes was not at all pacific, but charged with fury, like the transient fire in opals.

I paused, smirking.

"Since you're clearly already senseless, I suppose my only option is to beat some sense back _in_."

I saw your grip tighten on Rebellion.

"Then let's do this."

"Why would you want to lose again so soon?" I asked you, smoothly.

You shook your head, sighing.

"Now, see- that's just the kind of thing that guarantees you'll _never_ see the end of this, Verge."

"I'll just go and change," I said, narrowing my eyes.

"I'll be waiting."

"Fine," I sighed, leaving you to your own devices.

I have no explanation for why I indulged you, save that I always had, and somehow I always did, even if it had not been part of my agenda at the outset.

Surely it was not because of your charm.

By the grandfather clock in the hall it was 1 AM.

_Don't tell me, mother, that I don't accommodate your precious child_, I thought, resentfully.

By the time I reached my room I had decided that she was a completely myopic lunatic. Whatever Father's little secret was, it had clearly affected her sensibilities.

After all, who was it that humored all your brutal little tantrums? Who gamely played along with your attention-seeking antics?

Not she, surely.

Although she indulged you in every otherwise conceivable way, I never once saw her take a roque mallet to the temple.

I frowned at the sullen moon, which seemed to have followed me, looming outside my windows like a red rubber ball that had been mistakenly locked out of God's toy box for the night.

I wondered if he missed it, the petulant little bastard.

It was then that I heard your telltale tread outside my door, as unmistakable to me as your face. Apparently not content to cool your heels in the ballroom, you had tailed me back to my room to ensure that I deigned to satisfy your demands for nocturnal bloodsport.

Speaking of petulant little bastards.

"Dante," I said without turning. "One would think you missed me."

"Oh, I did," you said, inviting yourself in. "It wasn't the same without you. You turn a big cold room into a cozy inferno with the warmth of your brotherly affection."

I smirked.

"Whereas you make a big room entirely too small."

"Ouch. Careful with that axe, Vergil."

I rolled my eyes at the velvet-embossed wall, echoing the looping scrolls and furbelows.

"Why don't you return to the ballroom with your tender feelings?"

"Did I mention I hate being alone in the dark?"

"It's dark in here," I said, negligent.

"You miss my point," you said, lightly, and as you did I felt the tip of daddy's sword against my back, pressing in just firmly enough to be evident. "Really, Vergil, you surprise me."

That made two of us, o my brother.

"You shouldn't play with Father's things," I remarked, into the silence, "if you don't know how to handle them."

You laughed slightly.

"Is that how you identify yourself? One of Father's things?"

As always, sharper than I gave you credit for. How many times, I wondered, would I be surprised by your unexpected acumen? Despite your careless and brazen demeanor, you missed very little.

_I would do very well to remember that_, I thought.

Behind me I heard the unmistakable creak and shift of red leather, and knew you were becoming impatient.

But no- it was not that.

You had shed your coat, I realized.

My eyes narrowed.

"What exactly is the game here, brother?"

"You should know." A slight laugh. "You started it."

"Did I."

My gaze flicked to the darkened window glass, rendered reflective by the low and softly warring glow of the lamps. I saw you and I, silent and suspended in the many-paned frames- a nightmare still-life, our alpine hair stark against the night outside.

I had meant to take only a swift glance, a mercenary assessment, if you will- but somehow I lingered, rapt, absorbing the ghost image.

It was a bizarrely intimate tableau. Your chest was bared so casually, your stance so ardent. I in my robe, as if I had intended to be so informal and unstudied in your presence. I could not help but think of it, o my brother.

With your head inclined toward mine, you looked like a lover.

All at once I was struck by a macabre desire to know how this curious impasse would culminate. It occurred to me that I might humor your caprices, and see what ensued.

I could afford to be indulgent. Yamato was well within my grasp at any time I might deem it wise to terminate our twisted and touching little moment. She lay tucked beneath the immense headboard of the bed, exactly as I had left her upon going to sleep, concealed from all but the wisdom of my knowing fingers.

Not being privy to my pre-slumber rituals, you could hardly know that, of course. And you would not. To tell you would almost certainly spoil the game, and I had no intention of doing that.

* * *


	6. Chapter 6

_**

* * *

Chapter VI.**_

* * *

Things were just getting interesting, as you were wont to say.

But the scenery was becoming tired.

Ignoring the threat of your hovering blade, I turned around to face you.

You pressed your lips together warningly. Rebellion's tip skimmed the silk at my waist, whispering menace. Now it pointed directly at my abdomen.

A diminutive smile crossed my lips, unbidden.

Eventually your mouth twitched, and your smile slowly mirrored mine.

"Do I look that good from behind?" you asked, shamelessly. Then you laughed. "What am I talking about. Of course I do."

"It's my favorite view of you, to be sure," I replied, evenly. "It generally means you're leaving."

Our eyes met, mine inexorable, and yours, suspiciously good-natured. I recognized the insolent grin that transformed your features, but it had taken on an entirely new significance, acquiring connotations I had never even imagined.

"So what do you have on under there, anyway?"

"Nothing you'd be interested in," I replied coolly, leaning back against the bedpost. There was no way of knowing how long you'd drag this out, o my brother, and I determined that I would be comfortable, in any event.

You shrugged, nonchalant, as the point of the blade began to graze upward over the flat of my stomach.

"You're always saying I'm interested in nothing."

"I'm always saying you'll _amount_ to nothing."

Rebellion continued tracing its invisible line, over the elegantly finished edge of my lapel and onto the bared skin of my chest.

"And here I am making nice," you said. "Where's the love, Vergil?"

"That's what Mother wanted to know," I murmured cryptically, unable to avoid responding to the cold caress of Father's steel, wielded by your indecent hand.

"I'll probably regret saying this later, but I don't give a somersaulting fuck about mom right now."

You shifted the blade ever so slightly, pressing into my skin, sliding it beneath the heavy fabric at my left shoulder, flawlessly leveraging its tip and parting the silk from my body.

I could entertain no more doubts as far as your motives were concerned; you were disrobing me, blatant and unapologetic in this activity as in all other things, and yet employing Rebellion with more finesse than I had ever seen you exhibit in combat, o my brother.

I raised my eyebrows.

"My, my. What am I to think of this, Dante?"

I knew your lackadaisical habits when it came to maintaining your weapons, or I might have been less content with the amorous attentions of your blade.

Were I to do the same with Yamato, your chest would be in ribbons.

The thought made me smile.

You had moved on to my other shoulder, arrogantly incisive, as if this were delicate elective surgery, and not deviant mutual seduction.

The fine imported silk of my Banyan robe was no match for your raw indigenous insistence, peeling back upon itself and slipping from my chest. I stood motionless, idly watching as it fell. It settled just below the taut, cut lines of my hip, pulled down by its own gratifying weight, yet held in tenuous check by the sash at my loins.

I looked at you, and my lips curved slightly.

Your eyes were the same as when we sparred, snapping and hot blue, almost incandescent.

"You catching on yet?"

"It's becoming more clarion," I said, dryly.

"There you go again," you muttered. "What is that, Latin?"

"Not at all." I paused. "Would you like to hear some?"

You stared at me as if I had grown another head. I took it as a yes.

"_Lupus est homo homini_," I intoned, raising my eyebrows and leaning forward, aware of the soft, harsh sibilance of my own voice.

"That doesn't sound good," you said. "Or wait. Maybe it _does_."

"I said: Man is a wolf to man, Dante."

A moment, while you saturated in that revelation.

You smiled very slowly.

"I like. Anything else?"

"_Sua cuique voluptas. Quod natura non sunt turpia_."

"I don't really remember all that much Latin."

"You might have studied harder, o my brother, if you had but known where a knowledge of the Mater Linguae would get you," I remarked, wryly, feeling my cock stiffen despite my amusement.

"_Revera… Linguam. Latinam…Vix…Cognovi_," you bit out deliberately.

"So you said."

"Spill, Vergil. Before I kick you in the Latin Quarter."

I smiled darkly.

"Every man has his pleasures. What is natural cannot be bad."

You breathed out, bracing your hand on the post above my head, and leaning in. Though you did not touch me, I felt your mouth beside my ear.

"_Pace tua_."

With your consent.

Oddly considerate on your part.

"_Nihil obstat_."

Nothing prevents it.

You did not hesitate, and I did not expect you to. All at once your body was pressed up against mine, the flesh of your chest impossibly smooth and firm against my own, unnaturally warm and undeniably arousing.

Your hand found my jaw, as I had done to you in the courtyard, and you repaid my advance with interest, your mouth both yielding and relentless all at once, as if it both pleaded and demanded, and it made me very hungry, o my brother, very hungry indeed.

Your lips parted almost at once after touching mine, as if even at the basest level of your nature, you could not resist raising the stakes, inciting me to retaliate.

I did so, letting my tongue trace your cloven lips and slip between them, serpentine, observing nothing but the familiar sensation of oddly sensual pleasure I secretly identified with all things Dante, now magnified a hundred thousand times and raising the hairs upon my neck.

You were nothing if not responsive, meeting my sly overture with a veritable onslaught, your lips intuitively seeking every angle of contact, voraciously driving me toward new expressions of depravity.

In one hand you still held Rebellion, now forgotten; the other hand slid downward, roaming curiously over the contours of my side, tapered fingers seeking the intercostal ripples of my torso with something like wonder. You seemed intrigued, both by the novelty of my identity, and the notion of touching me in such a way.

When the kiss finally broke beneath its own weight, you pulled back, letting your eyes run over my features for a moment, as if marking them, assuring yourself that it was truly I who stood before you- your own dear brother, whose hands, even now, were mercilessly seeking to pull you closer once more.

Your eyes narrowed lustfully, mirroring my own, causing me to smile ever so slightly.

You ran your thumb over my lip, twice, and kissed me brutally, letting a little more of yourself slip, now that the forbidden was well and truly breached.

"This is wrong," you said, and I knew you meant exactly the inverse.

Such taboos are constructs of humanity, and we were decidedly not among the members of that club, though I suspect you've applied to join once or twice since. I don't hold it against you.

Meanwhile, my hand had found your hair, and your mouth had found my jaw, my throat, my chest- your insolent tongue flicking across the taut peak of my nipple, causing me to clench, your lustrous mane fisted in my palm like liquid platinum, spilling over my fingers.

There was a rough kind of finesse to your touch that was inexplicably appealing. It evoked the worst kind of want, brother- it brought me to shuddering, and left me consumed by a cold hedonism.

Never had I doubted the ancient primal desires coiled inside my stone façade- they were there, albeit silent. But I had not counted upon the magnitude of your own, locked inside that careless, cocksure veneer, lying in wait somewhere beneath that lazy insouciance that passed for personality.

I wound my hand deeper into your hair, dragging your head up, crushing my mouth against yours.

And how bizarre, to kiss one's brother, one's twin, and yet find nothing of yourself there.

How gratifying.

I released your head with a sigh, watching the pale strands fall upon themselves once more in perfectly smooth disarray. As always, that wayward fringe swept artfully across your face, obscuring your eyes. An incorruptible force, your hair.

"You're cold," you said, laconically. "Feels good."

"Cold?" I asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Your skin is like marble," you said, with an indolent grin. "Soft, though."

Ah. Yes, I had noticed that, Dante, in the context of yourself- long before that night, perhaps as a child, perhaps even in utero. Your body was unseasonably warm, as if subject to the influence of an inner sun, as if you burned inside. It tempered my own icy fever. I found it pleasant, as a child.

I found it more than pleasant now.

"You know why Mother named you Dante, of course," I intoned, in a low voice.

You smiled.

"You may be right. Can't have been a fun pregnancy."

I idly wondered if there was actually such a thing as a "fun pregnancy", and exactly how many women were destined to slap you in your lifetime.

"Like giving birth to a sack of live coals, I imagine," I said, feeling your leather-clad thigh insinuate itself unsubtly between my legs.

"And what about you, Mr. Freeze? Why _Vergil_?"

"Am I really to understand you've never read your namesake's magnum opus?"

"It's on my list," you said. "Somewhere between flossing and having sex with my brother."

"You should read it. You might find it informative."

"Right now I prefer revealing."

Your hand slid beneath the edge of my half-discarded robe, fingers stroking firmly over the flesh of my loins, taunting that strangely compelling nether-region where thigh met trunk.

"Like ice," you murmured. "Some really nice ice."

"I think neither of us were particularly popular guests in mommy and daddy's bed," I hissed, willfully controlling my reaction.

It found it took considerable effort.

You smiled.

"I always figured it was because they wanted to fuck."

The word passed your lips with casual audacity, causing my cock to twitch, in spite of my best intentions.

"I'd be surprised if Father ever got another chance to board the good ship after knocking her up with such unusual cargo."

"Aw, come on Verge. I bet Mom likes a few c.c.s in her ride."

"That's creepy, Dante. Shut up before I lose motivation."

You looked at me, all business now, as if someone had flipped a switch behind your eyes, as if somewhere beneath all that handsome arrogance lay an actual plan, and a calculating mind.

"You won't."

You shifted your weight, and your leg pressed more firmly against my crotch. I felt the rare caress of warm, worn leather against my cock and balls.

"Reassure me," I murmured, dryly.

"Funny you should say that," you remarked, quietly. Another slight shift of your body, and I tensed, breathing out reflexively against the sensation. "I was just thinking about how I used to have nightmares."

"We both did," I muttered. "Another inexplicable gift from Father, no doubt."

"So you remember."

"All too well," I replied. "Flaming wheels and shrieking things with wings. Shards of colored glass."

You smiled, your hand grazing over my stomach.

"Falling through an endless chapel," you whispered. "Standing on a peak miles above, with lights below, and the eye of a storm overhead."

I shivered, although I knew not whether because of your words or your actions.

"I was there," I admitted.

"I know that," you said, simply. "We both were."

You leaned forward once more, grinding into me, carelessly inviting devastation. Your voice dropped to a hush.

"But you know what else I remember? I never went to Mom and Dad when I was afraid. I went to you."

* * *


	7. Chapter 7

_**

* * *

Chapter VII.**_

* * *

It was true, o my brother, I realized once you said it.

I met your gaze, all thoughts arrested for a moment, on the precipice of something, some unspoken understanding, something greater than either of us alone- and still my traitorous body trembled with cold, furious need.

In either case, it always came down to the sum of us.

Sparda et al. Sparda and Sons. Sons _sans_ Sparda.

Dante and Vergil, respectively.

I looked at you, luminous and breathless before me, a living contradiction- the grounded humor in your unearthly eyes, the sensuously feral mouth I wanted to kiss yet again.

You turned into my body, slowly, deliberately, and all at once I felt the unyielding hardness of your cock against my own, like the revelation of a blinding sun.

Your face was inches from mine, your lips parted, eyes shadowed beneath that jagged snowbank of hair.

"So, Vergil. Can I sleep in your bed tonight?"

Little smile, so faint it didn't reach your eyes.

Silence, beyond which the ticking of the grandfather clock could be heard in the outside hall.

"You can try," I ground out in a low voice.

I put my hands on your hips and drew you to me once more, crushing our mouths together.

Rebellion began to slip absently from your hand as gravity and distraction took their inevitable toll, the blade grazing my thigh.

I felt a trickle of tepid blood round the carved bend of my calf and curl slyly over my ankle. Normally I would hardly have cared for such an insignificant wound, but at that moment, o my brother, it irked me unreasonably.

It seemed a counterfeit act of penetration, Rebellion an ersatz proxy.

The time for fucking in pantomime was over.

"Put that thing down," I hissed. "If you feel incomplete without it, I've got something else for you to grip."

Your eyes lit up with primal approval.

"Now _that's_ pretty obscene," you murmured. "I'm impressed."

"Drop that goddamn glorified stick and jack me off."

You widened your eyes.

"Vergil Sparda," you exclaimed. "Is that you?"

"Most assuredly," I snapped. "Even more of me than usual."

With a shrug you cast the weapon aside. It pinwheeled and stuck in the elaborate façade of the doorframe, skewering a carefree cherub like a romantic hors d'oeuvre.

"Tell you what," you announced. "I'll do you one better."

You looked unaccountably smug as you reached out, casually shoving me onto the bed. I didn't resist, falling back, resting on my elbows, watching you coolly.

"I'll make it worth your while."

"See, that's what I love about you, Verge. You give as good as you get."

"Better," I told you, darkly.

"Jury's still out on that," you replied, curving your fingers around the dark wood of the bed post, jauntily crawling up to join me, lithe and effortless. "Make some room."

Wordlessly, I did, rising upright on my hands, shifting easily on the heavy velvet duvet, watching you smile as you eyed my chest, o my brother, hardly surreptitious. You followed me in lazy, lagging tandem, your hands easing onto my thighs, pressing me into the voluminous bedding as I reclined once more, my back settling against the cold wood of the headboard.

"The jury may be out, but the verdict never changes," I told you, exhaling softly as your fingers sought the knotted silk sash that still encircled my loins. "I know all your tricks."

"Papa's got a whole new bag, Verge," you whispered.

"Really."

"Oh yeah."

"I can't imagine you have an ace up your sleeve," I murmured irreverently, "seeing as you so rarely wear a shirt."

"This knot is being a real bitch," you muttered. You cast about for something, looking bemused, then caught sight of the doorframe where Rebellion glinted in a hackneyed impression of Excalibur.

"Finding yourself weaponless, brother?" I asked, dryly.

"Not hardly," you said, smirking lewdly and leaning forward. "I'm armed to the teeth."

"Shall I just-?" I raised an eyebrow, reaching down and untying the sash. "Like most things, there's a trick to it."

The dark blue silk fell away from me like folding wings, slipping over the edge of my body into oblivion.

I heard you breathe out, almost reverently, and wondered if you were even aware you had responded.

"Guess that particular trick wasn't in the bag," I said, narrowing my eyes.

"Why don't you get bent," you said, dutifully issuing the standard invitation, but there was an unusual absence to your tone.

Your fingers proved more present, as intrepid hands moved upward over my inner thighs, spreading them slightly outward. Hands that were, by all rights, identical to mine- but no, they were your own, intrinsically natural and unrefined, skimming my flesh in a blaze of warmth that was gratifying on a stirring and visceral level that I had not anticipated.

I could feel you keenly- the slightly roughened surface of your palms, each infinite squeeze and press of your fingertips as you explored this new terrain, the sole part of me you had never had the occasion to accost. In that moment it seemed inconceivable that you had ever done anything else, o my brother.

Your lips lay slightly open in your concentration, unwittingly tempting my senses. Your gaze was liquid and obscure, boldly taking in my naked state; your eyes visible only as shards of pristine blue, intermittent and overhung with strands of soft, stabbing mercury.

As your fingers grazed my straining cock, I arched into your hands. Looking down, I met your eyes, and saw that you smiled.

"You're hard as a rock," you said unceremoniously.

"Of course."

You tightened your grip, experimentally, assessing the contours of my too, too solid flesh with a look not unlike fascination.

I felt a shudder chase through me at being held in your grasp, at the immodest ease with which you touched me, almost as if our acquaintance had always been intimate, and I had simply not been aware of it. An unholy glow resonated outward from the pit of my loins, and I threw back my head, quietly reveling in the bittersweet sensation.

"Where's all that Latin now, big brother?" You purred, arrogantly, as you began to work over my length with rough, assured strokes.

"_Res ipsa loquitur_," I obliged, feeling the muscles of my stomach ribbon and contract in response. I breathed deeply, overriding the urge to bite my lip.

"Yeah," you affirmed in a hushed and vibrant undertone. "Like that."

It dawned on me, vaguely, through the steady, relentless thrum of my body's arousal, that I had found a trigger, a weakness- a chink in your carnal armor.

Why brother, you had a taste for the classics after all.

"_Dextra mihi Deus_," I let the words slip past my lips. "My right hand is to me as a god. Is this how you handle yourself, brother? After we spar? Do you stroke your cock?"

"Maybe I do," you breathed, without hesitation. "Does that get you off, Vergil?"

I smiled coolly, letting my head fall back, relishing the raw, lustful indulgence of your hands, the lambent glow in the crux of my loins.

"_Ad capite ad calcum_," I intoned, purely to watch the effect of my words on your face- how your eyes glazed, and your lips parted slightly, softening the sculpted lines. How extraordinary to see those sharp features I knew so well blunted with hunger and sensuality.

From head to heel, Dante. I confessed willingly, though whether you understood me or not is subject to conjecture.

I don't think it mattered in the final analysis.

Your motions lost their rhythm for a moment, and then you redoubled your efforts, causing me to hiss- a crude, beautiful word that was soon lost to the night.

"That didn't sound like Latin," you said. You seemed to have reclaimed yourself once more, but your eyes remained feverish, betraying your tone.

"You wouldn't know Latin if it fucked you sideways."

"_Auribus teneo lupum_," you murmured, easing your thumb over the head of my cock.

"…You hold a wolf by the ears?"

You grinned darkly.

So you did remember some of our lessons, o my brother, although I doubt this was the context in which they were intended to apply.

"_Facta, non verba_," I hissed in kind.

"What?"

"Deeds, not words, Dante," I said through gritted teeth.

"You want _action_, is that it?"

All at once you bent your head, a flash of wicked silver descending, brushing across my thighs. I felt your mouth envelop my length, warm and encompassing, slick and shocking.

I am rarely taken by surprise, o my brother, as you well know- but this proved to be one of those rarities.

It rendered me stricken for several moments, before the reality of what you had done sank into the loam of my more rational mind.

This isn't so surprising, I thought, as my hand found your head and my fingers wound into your hair. It was an act committed with your customary audacity, after all; there was nothing amiss in the twisted world of the twins-

Save for the rather irrefutable fact that you were sucking my cock.

I shuddered, somewhere unseen, somewhere inside.

Shifting down into the pillows, I let my eyes look on, brazenly, as you had done to me. Surreal, this vista, framed by the cradle of my legs- your lean, rangy form spread out before me, my doppelganger, my replica, my antithesis, my bittersweet anathema. Six foot six, we were. Perhaps I had a half-inch on you, but your asinine shit-kicking boots easily negated that, and soothed your vanity.

My brother, my blood.

Who would have thought your approach would be so…unflawed.

Your slid your tongue hotly across me, causing tremors, taunting the flushed skin before swallowing it once more, my cock down your throat, o my brother, and my body at your mercy.

I had thought you full of passion when you tried to kill me, but that was mere foreplay beside what I now encountered.

Your hands sought me, clenching the rise of my hips, as you subjected me to the ruthless adulation of your lips and tongue- regripping, driving beneath me to grasp my taut backside, bracing me beneath your voracious mouth.

Ravenous, grasping, insatiable. Your need seemed boundless, as if you could devour me alive.

I hope you're happy, Mother, I thought. This is what happens when I let Dante love me.

You paused for breath, your lips wantonly stained, lust-flushed; your eyes brilliant and hedonic as you looked up at me.

And you smiled.

* * *


	8. Chapter 8

_**

* * *

Chapter VIII.**_

* * *

I have always harbored an uneasy suspicion, Dante, that if I allowed it, your vigor would surround me like an eager sea, and pull me under.

Drowning is of no concern- you are indomitable, not deep.

Rather, I have visions of swimming for eternity, embraced by the insatiable waves, engulfed by your merciless affection.

I am Desire, I am Want- but you are Need, personified. I coldly take, but you hotly demand. You crave where I merely covet.

Best to keep you at arm's length.

Best to withhold myself.

And yet, it seems I never could, brother, not in the ways that mattered.

My hands slid downward from your hair, and I held your face in my palms, caressing the prominent bones of your cheeks, sacrosanct, a blasphemous relic for my hands alone.

"All your blast and bravado," I said, my voice low and heavy with arousal. My hands, indulgent, ardent, my senses encompassed by your nuclear warmth. "It's quite admirable, brother. But I can still trump you."

"Don't get ahead of yourself," you intoned, snaking your hand beneath the taut weight of my testes. "I'm not done yet."

"No? Then by all means," I purred into your ear. "_Lambendo effingere_."

Lick into shape, I told you.

A quote from my namesake, twisted to suit, to amuse myself, to distract from the ubiquitous sexual need that owned my attention.

A shudder went through you, and distraction failed me spectacularly as you turned your face into my hand, moving your lips feverishly against my palm.

Then you pulled back, and I felt your mouth slide down, once more, over the sensitive skin of my groin. Your hand eased beneath my thigh, raising my leg slightly, and you angled, sliding one of your shoulders under it, spreading me before you.

You wouldn't. You couldn't.

Strands of arctic white had begun to harass my temples. I ran my fingers through my hair distractedly, easing it back from my brow.

With the first descent of your tongue, my back arched upward, like a strung bow, and once again I had underestimated you, o my brother.

"Fuck," I hissed. "You must be kidding."

You shook your head.

My hand reached out and caught the bedpost behind me, just in time to absorb another jolt as my body tensed and dissolved in a miasma of indecent pleasure.

Encouraged, you pressed further, pushing the flat of your tongue against the rarified flesh of my orifice, causing me to clench my jaw.

I threw my head back, feeling my breath catch, conscious of the rise and fall of my chest. My muscles were well wrought; defined, defiant, and accustomed to exertion. I trained for hours each day, o my brother, to master my weapons, and yet you brought me to the brink of collapse with the simple lashing of a tongue-tip. Unthinkable.

Indeed, I could not think.

I wondered if this was what it felt like to be you.

A dry smile threatened to bloom but never crossed my lips, for you chose that very moment to push your tongue inside me, twisting gently inward, and I actually cried out, a sharp, short, hiss of a sound.

It pleased you, brother, no end- I could easily tell by the passionate flare of your attentions. You thrilled to every tremor, to have me so hamstrung and demonstrative before you.

My hand tightened on the bedpost, as if I could ward off my mounting arousal by transferring my physical tension.

Could one truly achieve orgasm this way? I began to suspect one could, if the perpetrator of the act were determined enough.

"Enough," I managed, unwilling to end like this. "You've made your point."

You drew back, stroking your fingertips lightly across your lips, giving me an insolent wink.

Lunging forward, I drove my hand into your hair, clutching the limpid locks in my fingers.

I twisted your head back, ruthlessly precise, and kissed your upturned mouth, feeling the shape of your wicked smile beneath my lips. I released you roughly, but you stayed where you were, smiling still.

"Some trick, huh."

You looked inordinately pleased with yourself.

"Indeed, that was quite the _lapsus linguae_, brother," I allowed, calmly, leaning back.

"That was no slip of the tongue, Vergil," you informed me, crawling over my body.

"All the same, I'll thank you never again to refer to yourself as 'papa'," I murmured, as an afterthought. "That's creepy."

"You have a lot of weird hang-ups for a guy who doesn't mind getting head from his little brother."

"Three minutes does not a little brother make," I said, acerbically, but catching sight of you gloating and smirking, I was forced to rec0nsider.

There was a moment of quiet, as you studied me.

"You're pretty hot, Vergil. Did I ever mention that?"

I raised an eyebrow, returning your gaze.

"Considering how much you say it about yourself, I always just took it as a compliment by extension," I told you dryly.

"See, that's smart. A compliment for me _is_ a compliment for you." You ran your fingers boldly over my cheek, and it felt more intimate than anything else you'd done. "You always were the brilliant one."

You smiled, as if daring me to retort.

I understood you. It was different now, in an unprecedented way. Looking at you was not the same. Now I could freely admire your more appealing attributes, o my brother, not that I was ever unaware of them. Now I could drink you in as an object, something to actively desire, and I did so, beginning with the strong, twining musculature of the arms that casually caged my body as they held the weight of yours. You were slightly broader than I was, if not stronger, lean and lazy in your body mechanics. Your shoulders were perfectly squared, as if one could calibrate right angles by completing each rounded edge.

Above it all was your face, chiseled and beatific, seemingly at odds with such a brute, pugilistic frame, although your features held a slight and appealing roughness absent from my own. It fascinated me, how we could possess our own appearances so thoroughly, despite being incontrovertibly identical.

It was not difficult to desire you, brother.

My cock still throbbed for want of release, and that alone did not express the extent of my arousal. New tricks, indeed. Perhaps there was hope for your combat technique.

But that was hardly the primary concern I had at that moment, reclining indolently beneath you, embraced by the blue-dark night.

Even in the scant light, the platinum glow of your hair lent its luminescence to your face, and I could see the feverish glint behind your eyes.

I cocked my head, slowly, regarding you with flawlessly feigned dispassion.

"I wonder if all this…considerable _vigor_…of yours permeates everything you do."

"Wanna find out?"

"Why not."

You paused, smirking.

"I'm guessing you'll want the honors, huh Verge."

A good guess. However, oddly enough, on this particular night it was an honor I was inclined to decline.

"And you don't?" I asked, amused. "The _ius prima nocte_ holds no appeal for your refined sensibilities?"

"Oh, yeah, I want it," you returned, an edge of darkness inflecting your usual flippant tone. "Don't get me wrong. But you and I never could decide who's on top. Not without a fight. Not even when it came to bunk beds. Why should this be any different?"

Why indeed. But it was. Something Mother said made me certain that this was how it had to be, o my brother. At least for now.

"_Cedo maiori_," I intoned, slowly, deliberately.

Your eyes narrowed into perfectly attractive slits, mimicking slices of sky.

"You don't mean that."

I smiled coolly.

"It's the procedure. I live for these little rituals."

"There's no honor in that," you said. Bemused, I heard you speak my own words back to me, without irony, and this time it seemed you genuinely endorsed them.

I regarded you for a moment.

"Actually, there is," I told you.

You inhaled softly, looking suspicious.

"And what makes you so…"

"Magnanimous?" I shrugged. "Maybe I like what I've seen, brother."

Your smile was very gradual, o my brother, but once it bloomed it was staggering.

"You haven't seen anything yet."

"Yes. Let's amend that, shall we?" I replied maliciously, pulling your face down to mine. Your tongue slipped into my waiting mouth with the ease of entitlement, stroking across my own.

"These," I breathed, hooking my finger beneath the low waist of your leather pants. "Shed."

I shoved you back after a suitable moment, and you allowed yourself to stagger onto your feet, shooting me a mildly reproachful glance as you deftly found the zipper of your pants with one hand.

Truly, brother, I wonder that you had to unzip them at all, low-cut and hip-slung as they were; I doubted one short fastener actually held that much sway over the integrity of the garment.

I watched you with interest, which quickly evolved into intrigue as you eased the tight leather over your hips with practiced expertise.

"Done," you said, throwing them into the nameless darkness that lay at the edges of my room. "You happy now?"

You stood insouciantly by the bed, showcasing yourself unabashedly for my appraisal. Dante, and only Dante. No ludicrous red coat, no guarded smirk.

My brother, my twin.

The sullen moon tipped amber light over the more intricate aspects of your physique, accentuating the carved bronze surface of your stomach, idly painting the taut descending lines of your hips. You conformed to that uniquely male triumvirate that is the carnal equivalent of an hourglass in women; wide shoulders and chest, tapering down to lean and sculpted loins.

Not as refined as my own body, but more brute- and thoroughly enticing. Your cock was broad and indecently prominent, jutting upward like a compass seeking an infinite North.

"Well, Vergil? You like me unwrapped?" you asked, with a serious smile.

I did, o my brother. In uncounted ways.

"Yes."

You wasted little time once the word had passed my lips. All pretense of casual carelessness abruptly tossed aside, now you were back on top of me, the new and sudden sensation of forbidden skin against my own causing me to reel.

"Yeah," you muttered. "I want you too."

"I'm given to understatement," I hissed, grabbing your body and pulling it flush against my own.

You exhaled, leaning in so that your mouth grazed my neck.

"I know," you murmured. "You don't have to tell me."

Your hand ran over my upper arm, tracing the muscles of it. I shivered.

"I'm not in the mood to _make love_, Dante," I whispered frostily. "I suggest you penetrate, before I become unkind."

You looked unconcerned at the prospect.

"Hey, you weren't in the mood to fight, either. Remember?"

"We didn't fight," I pointed out.

"Good thing, huh?" you intoned.

I narrowed my eyes.

"It's not too late to start."

I seized your hair and you moaned, a sound that I found myself growing rather fond of.

"Mellow out," you muttered.

You sought my chest, lightly finding a nipple with your mouth. I felt my hands relax their hold, despite my annoyance. Your teeth sawed gently, and I sighed against your hair.

"Do you really intend to drag this out, you beautiful idiot?"

"No," you whispered, touching your lips to mine, a scarce brush of a gesture that caused us both chills.

"Then fuck me," I intoned, surprised by the oddly tender sound of the words. "Come into me, brother."

Somehow my hands had gone from violently censuring to willfully soothing in a transient, untraceable moment. They unconsciously stroked your hair, as if to reassure you, as if to protect you, but as I had so vehemently told mother, you needed neither of these things, o my brother-

So why did I feel such a compulsion? Such obligation to you?

I eyed you with almost unbearable calm, despite my feverish state.

"_Quod incepimus conficiemus." W_hat we have begun we shall finish, I told you, in a pointedly lustful hush, feeling your body tense as you tried in vain to stifle your reaction. "_Incipit_."

Begin here.

* * *


	9. Chapter 9

_**

* * *

Chapter IX.**_

* * *

Your lips parted, and you hesitated.

"I should get something…slick things up, you know?"

"You're not serious," I said, laughing harshly. "You can't kill me with daddy's little sword. Do you really think you could hurt me with your _dick_?"

"Fine," you said. "If _that's_ how you want it."

Your body hummed with intensity and heat against the cool resonance of my own, as you leaned in, intersecting the widening delta of my thighs.

You breathed out, catching my mouth in a hungry kiss, your fingers impressing my naked skin.

"Let me turn," I hissed, against your lips.

Your eyes intensified, the haze of arousal dissipating briefly.

"No," you murmured, quickly, as you pressed my shoulder back.

My eyebrows raised, but I said nothing.

Your hands eased my thighs back and upward, and I felt your cock, hard against me, o my brother, stiffened steel in a velveteen sleeve. The head was blunt and unrelenting, a glancing heat on the aroused skin of my orifice.

"This works, right?" you breathed.

"Suit yourself," I said. Your face was inches from mine, brother, your eyes light and vivid, and I hardly cared how it happened.

Something shifted in you then, as if you suddenly awoke to the reality of our proximity, and the pull of your aching need, the one that resonated to my own like the longing vibration of harmonic strings.

Never in unison, but desperate to blend, o my brother, and I saw it at last, laid bare in your eyes, as if you had always known and suffered and hated yourself for being so drawn, and me, for being so icily oblivious.

You moved forward with a roughness that both gratified and surprised me, and I exhaled in a hiss, feeling the broadness of your cock breach me soundly and push beyond, the pain incidental to the indecent thrill of it.

You flexed your hips against my body's intrinsic resistance, pressing on with relentless intent, as I wanted it, until your unmentionable flesh lay buried fully inside me, and I held you in my arms, taut and trembling against my skin.

"_Edo et amo_," I muttered, overcome, in spite of myself.

"You're speaking in tongues again," you breathed.

I was aware that I had said far more than I intended, and far more bluntly and succinctly than I ever would have had my wits been intact, and my brother not shuddering before me, vulnerable in his need and vicious with desire.

Your ignorance, Dante, was my saving grace, though it was hardly the first time.

"My apologies, brother. No more Latin."

"I don't mind," you said quickly. "It has a certain je ne sais quoi."

"_Nescio quid_, you mean," I purred, against the hollow of your collarbone.

"_Bene_," you breathed, dropping your head, rebellious strands of your silvered hair invading my vision, brushing the sensual curve of your jutting lower lip.

It was good, o my brother, you did not lie.

My fingers crept over your lower back, easing slowly downward, marking the deep and sensual dip of your sacroiliac, cresting the warm upslope of your backside. You froze into my touch, as my hands curved mindfully around the contour of your ass. I gripped you tightly.

"Vergil-" you murmured, biting your lip.

"Silence is golden, brother," I intoned, shivering at the feel of you beneath my fingers.

Your cock pulsed and stilled within me, keeping a vigil of anticipation, unyielding to the press of my flesh. I shifted abruptly, a violent adjustment of our arrangement, orienting myself to your body, you more deeply into me.

"Wouldn't want to wake Mommy, after all," I added, in a harsh whisper.

Your hair cast shadows across your face, obscuring your smile, but it mattered little. I felt, rather than saw it.

Your body was hard-wrought, solid with muscle and radiant with heat, and I luxuriated in our strange armistice of atomic warmth and nuclear winter.

You began to move, slowly at first, and cities crumbled, o my brother- or if they did not, if it was only my feverish perception, surely the walls of our great house faded into oblivion, and you and I were left alone on the head of a pin.

Fucking.

A deep and primal core was stirring within me, and my blood sang violently beneath my skin, yet your movements remained undeniably smooth and steady, like the dauntless revolutions of a solemn sea, lapping at my body with ancient patience.

It was what I had always feared, always hoped, ever denied.

I ran my hands over your body, caressing you brutally as you rocked forward, feeling the flat of your loins slapping my backside, the clipped, solid contact of flesh against flesh, the rhythmic brush of your chest over mine.

Your hair had fallen forward in a rain of bright snow, harassing the straight, fine planes of your nose, veiling your eyes. All at once you threw back your head, letting it fall away from your face, and I saw your features once more, o my brother, always praiseworthy, but rendered stunning in the grip of your passion.

Your cock surged inside me, beating out the pattern of your lust, resonating in my senses like a second heartbeat, primal and all-consuming. I clasped you to me, harder, feeling your weight bearing down on me, your movements lithe and serpentine as you rose and fell within. Inwardly, I shuddered at each pull of bittersweet pleasure, taunting me, spiraling blackly toward ruin.

Ah, but no, my brother. You deserved more of me. And I wanted more of you.

I opened my eyes and slowly breathed out, willfully chilling my response, determined to unravel the nature of your desire, to deconstruct your carnal triggers and turn them to a purpose that would please us both.

Twisting my hand into the hair at the nape of your neck, I drew your head back forcefully, searing a sensual line down your exposed throat with the point of my tongue.

As you moaned, I felt vindicated in this, brother, and so I continued, tracing a circle and biting within it, just hard enough to make you catch your breath, before soothing the sharpness away with my lips.

Stray pieces of my hair had fallen forward. I could feel the pale filaments toying with the corners of my eyes, grazing my face in a sensual cadence that kept time with your thrusts.

Your hand stroked over my brow, smoothing back the errant strands of winter-white.

"That's more like it," you said, in a low whisper.

"Like what?"

"Like you."

I was amused, somewhere beneath my arousal, and somewhere beneath that, perhaps even moved, o my brother, on some level.

There was nothing calm about your mindful restraint, for even your reverence held a certain relentless quality. Not unlike your style of combat- a dauntless onslaught, conquering through pure insistence. Whether carved out in tenderness or violence, the shape of your devotion was the same.

"I've been thinking," you said, breathlessly.

"Tonight is a first for many things."

"I _want _you to wake up mom," you murmured, against my shoulder. "When you come for me."

"Perish the thought," I snarled, clutching your back, cross-armed, feeling the ripple of your muscles beneath my forearms. "I really don't need another dysfunctional conversation with Eva."

You turned your lips into the shell of my ear.

"What would you do if she walked in right now?"

I shuddered.

"I wouldn't have thought you were so damaged, brother."

"If she walked in right now, I don't think I would stop," you whispered. "That's how fucking damaged this is, Vergil."

"She won't," I told you, gritting my teeth, but the seed had been planted in my imagination, and I could not help but perversely follow the twisted path of my mind's eye.

How lucidly, how clearly I could envision Eva, our own dear _Mater Dolorosa_, roused from a sound sleep by inexplicable sounds, making her way down the vast hallway and opening my door-

Confronted by the image of her white-haired devil sons, one wantonly pressing his flesh into the other beneath the sweeping arcs of canopied velvet, bodies illumed by moonlight- the curve of your back, etched in silver, the sleek and muscled arches of my legs, indolently butterflied outward to cradle your riding form. Crushed satin brocade jagged and crested around us like stillborn waves, rich against bared skin.

At a glance she would see the devastation trailing in our wake, your clothes carelessly discarded on the floor, littering the fine antiques. Your mouth locked to mine.

And she would hear us whisper in tongues, as strong, tapered fingertips ran across fevered skin and through silken locks, tilting snowy heads to press lips and teeth to throat.

What then, I wondered. Would she weep, or cry out, or intervene?

Would she _watch_, unnoticed and unobtrusive, from the door, unable to remove her eyes from such an obscenely compelling vision?

Or would she simply leave, as silently as she came, closing the door softly behind her?

I shuddered, shaking off my fantasismal depravity, in order to fully concentrate on the very palpable depravity currently in session.

"I wouldn't worry about Mommy, brother mine. She wouldn't come here."

"Not even…if you…screamed," you panted, punctuating the last word with a pointed thrust that made me exhale sharply and smirk.

"No doubt she's used to hearing screams at night," I told you, dryly. "Especially your screams. Her bedroom is right above the ballroom, after all."

"Ha. Don't you think it would sound different?" you pressed, struggling to keep the thread of your thoughts alive. "Fucking?"

I laughed, though my entire body was so erotogenic it almost hurt.

"What do you think we've been doing all these years?" I hissed, as your cock struck me somewhere unthinkable, and far too pleasing.

I arched up against you, and you made a noise of approval.

"Sparring," you said, kissing my mouth hungrily.

"Riiight," I drawled. "Sparring."

And then I saw it, all at once, surrounded in ribbons, suspended in the air before me- my method made clear.

I seized you by the back of your neck, and pulled you down so that I could speak into your ear.

"Dante," I said, urgently.

You gave a violent heave and I felt your breath catch.

My eyes narrowed in instant realization.

"You like it when I say your name," I said, and it wasn't a question.

A defiant look came into your eyes, as they met and held my gaze, but no words passed the threshold of your parted lips.

I watched them contort irresistibly beneath the barest graze of your white teeth.

"_Dante_," I repeated, intently.

"What do you want?" you demanded readily, your voice low and labored, intoxicated by lust.

"I want you to fuck me like you fight me, brother."

Ah, yes. Psychosexual physics in bloom. As with every door, a key. As with every action, an equal and opposite reaction.

Or overreaction, my brother. They might have amended the diktat had they known you.

My shoulders struck the headboard and I laughed out loud, a short fierce sound, clipped by a sharp breath as I felt the true impact of your cock inside me. A sweet and sour resonance began to seethe in the deep beneath my loins. You were truly fucking me now, brother, without pretense, taut-hipped and merciless, the pleasure intensified and remade with each brute thrust.

You reached for the headboard and grasped the top of it firmly, using it for leverage, even as I braced against it.

"Oh yeah, I like this," you whispered, your eyes closed, flinching against sensation. "Are you happy now, Vergil?"

Your blood was calling to mine, and I could feel it rising to the surface of my skin, drawn toward you, longing to merge once more with its estranged half. Like a wine-dark sea, this corresponding pull of tides inside us, held in check only by the boundaries of flesh, and so we sought to breach it in the only way we could, o my brother, though we knew not then what we did, or why we sought it.

So oceans knock against the edges of the sky, knowing they will eventually conquer the land.

Your cock thrust deep within me, broadened and flush with the blood of Sparda, the blood we shared, only the slightest of earthly membranes separating our essence from oneness, and nothing separating you from me.

_Are you happy?_

I was struck by a realization at that moment, Dante, one that both pained me and pleased me, one that I would never forget, no matter what transpired between or around us.

No matter how much, in later days, I may have wished to sever and deny it.

This was union, it was as close as our cloven soul could ever be, and that here, and only here, would we ever know equilibrium.

"Closer, brother," I hissed. "Come down to me."

"Yeah," you breathed. "No problem."

You released your hold on the headboard immediately, letting your body cover me, slick and hot against my own, your hands coming to rest on either side of my chest.

Sweetly obscene, the press of your hard musculature against mine, the intricate ripples of our stomachs interlocking like the pieces of a sculptural puzzle, my rigid cock trapped in the friction between the moving walls of our bodies, and you, moving inside me, Dante, as if you would die before relenting, that stubborn gleam in your eye that I knew so well.

I felt your mouth close over mine, your hair falling against the vaulted bones of my cheek, as my fingers dug into your flesh, hard enough to leave bruises that would be gone before I kicked you out of bed, o my brother.

I heard you moan, as the clock in the hall chimed the wolf hour, and I knew that I did not have long, because whoever came first, the other would surely follow.

Perhaps the house would fall down, perhaps the stupid moon would break into halves and fall into the field behind the house like a useless teacup.

What did it matter, Dante.

The realization that you were mine alone was staggering and clarion. In time, I would do many things in the name of that night. Not all of them were kind and benign. As much as I would come to displease you, I would also please you, in harsh and stolen moments of atonement.

"How does it feel to be perfect?" you whispered, as you thrust into me, and I raised my gaze to yours, incredulous, but sensually distracted. "Never a hair out of place. Never break a sweat. Never lose. Never fear. Never-"

"-shut up," I told you, because you're an idiot, because you never read between the lines, because nothing can be perfect when it isn't whole, no matter how complete it may be.

I seized your face in my hands and glared at you, breathing heavily.

"I'm perfect right now, and so are you. Don't fuck it up."

Your eyes were ripped from mine as you bowed your head.

My hands found your hips, re-gripping, as you pushed upward and drove into me, filling me again and again, pushing and grinding into the core of sweetness that could not hope to evade your onslaught, or hold out for much longer.

You threw back your head, the muscles in your throat and shoulders tensed and working, and I reached out to touch them. Unearthly, your face, like a graveyard angel- smooth and pale in the moonlight, eyes closed in violent ecstasy.

A single drop of sweat touched down on my lower lip, dissolving over the soft edge and onto my tongue, delicate and salty as a tear.

Your sweat, o my brother.

The milk of your exertion.

I moaned, unable to staunch my reaction, my mind and my body lost to me, every muscle responding to a power far more compelling than mine. I arched into you, as ecstasy gripped me by the throat, contracting, imploding from the outside in.

Your breath shot into overdrive, and your eyes flew open. You shuddered, overwhelmed, your mouth in a rictus that imitated suffering, but was no such thing.

"_Vergil_."

My name fell from your lips in hushed reverence, and it staggered me.

My hands were once again on your face, brother, fiercely holding you down to me. I clenched around you, as my loins locked open and my face turned skyward.

I cried out, a guttural sound, ripped from deep within my core, splitting the stillness of a night marked only by your shattered breathing. My cock erupted into the tight press of our flesh, coating our bellies with slickness, a vortex of sensation emanating throughout my loins.

"Brother... "

Your head fell forward, your mouth against my jaw, breathing harshly onto my skin. I felt the recoil of your cock inside me, bursting forth in violent reports like a gun, the kick between firings.

Your hips bucked furiously, pushing us through to the bitter end of our ordeal, your shoulders heaving with the convulsions of an unknown storm.

Gradually you slowed, and all fell silent, save for our shallow breathing and the ticking of the grandfather clock outside my door. Everything as we left it, brother- the great house, the late night. Later, now. The glow of the act haunted my loins long past the fading aftershocks.

The aurora mediocritas hung between us, suspended, like a net of liquid gold.

Silence, for an elastic moment, and then we stirred, and life returned.

You shook your head, blinking.

"Wow," you muttered. "I'm going to want to do that again."

After a moment's hesitation, you rose up on your arms, casually averting your eyes.

Your body shifted back slightly, breaking the seal of our contact, as you drew your cock out of me by increments, slowly, shivering as you did so.

"_Aspirat primo Fortuna labori_," I intoned, releasing you to do as you would, now that the ultimate moment had transcended time, gilded in sweat and seed, and indelible from our minds. I found the words of my namesake prescient, as always.

Fortune favors our first effort.

"Fuck, you _own_ that language," you hissed, heaving yourself onto the bed. You stretched out beside me, leaving space between us.

"Thank you," I replied dryly. "I'm glad my linguistic aptitude has finally found a worthy use."

"Oh yeah. I'm telling you."

I smiled in the dark, unable to help myself.

A moment passed. I felt you roll over onto your side and stare at me.

I kept my eyes straight ahead, steepling my fingers beneath my chin, brooding over the nature of all that had transpired, replaying each moment, searching myself for weakness.

You.

"Vergil," you intoned, pulling my divided attention fully back to yourself.

I was suddenly acutely conscious of your scent, your breathing, your warmth, your vital presence in my vast, dark bed.

"Vergil," you repeated, a little more intensely.

I turned to face you.

"Yes?" I asked, mildly.

"Stay with me."

"What-"

"You're doing it again. Zoning out."

It struck me that there was a transient plea in your voice, o my brother, even as you demanded.

"Perhaps I was thinking of you," I said, slowly.

"Think of me when I'm not here."

"I do."

This time it was you who fell silent.

"Mother told me to say that," I drawled, coolly, after a moment.

I ran a hand through my hair, and sat up, reaching forward.

I silently drew the bedcurtains, and pulled the heavy bedclothes up. Over myself, over you as well. They were all in disarray, merely a vast tangle of luxurious textiles, but I felt no immediate desire to straighten them.

"Did she say anything about giving me a little post-coital sugar?" you said. "Because you know, Vergil, that's just polite."

I sighed, turning into your arms, which were immediately open to me, welcoming, waiting, and I wound myself into you until we lay locked, impossibly close, our lips inches apart.

"Is that better, brother?" I asked, quietly, feeling my breath return to me, warmed by your skin.

"Yeah, that's pretty good." You paused, a lazy smile painting your features. "I feel like we've been here before."

"_Ab incunabulis_…" I murmured, trailing off as your mouth pressed against mine.

From the cradle…

You were warm, draped over me like a glaze, relaxed limbs spilling onto the exquisite sheets so carefully embroidered by those dear Carmelite nuns. And you were kissing me, deeply, purposefully, your hand mindlessly driven into my hair and roaming the sheets above my head.

I lay indolent and sated, indulging your explorations.

As it would happen, in the course of them you delved beyond the edge of the mattress. Your fingers curled around the hilt of the taichi, and your eyes widened, then narrowed, at the discovery.

"What's this?" you demanded, tearing your mouth from mine.

"It appears you've found a treasure," I said, amused.

"So you had a weapon this whole time."

"Of course. Don't be ridiculous."

"In your reach."

"Always."

"And you still let me-"

"Why wouldn't I?"

You paused, looking incredulous, then thoughtful.

"I don't know."

"Think, Dante."

"Because -" and for a moment your eyes were different, unguarded.

My finger sealed your lips.

"Probably."

* * *


	10. Chapter 10

_**

* * *

Chapter X.**_

* * *

Sleep came like undiluted morphine that night, like a hammer I had no time to feel. And I dreamed, o my brother, of things I had not dreamed since childhood, since the nightmares we spoke of in our lust.

It was not a nightmare, however- not as I remember them.

No visceral carnage, no ground cracking and falling away beneath our feet. No. Nothing like that.

In the dreams I always saw us plainly, but it was never so clear upon waking.

I was looking at you. For some time, only looking. Wanting you, as I did tonight, wanting you, beyond all else.

Face to face, we stood. There was shock in your eyes as I stepped forward, as if you hadn't actually realized I was there. The disbelief written there, as if you were seeing the impossible.

How could that be? You'd been looking right at me, right into my eyes.

It's only me, Dante. I thought you'd be glad.

It was my bedroom, after all, that we stood in. Who else had you come looking for, if not me?

Who did you expect to find, brother?

I took you into my bed, and then I took you, hearing your curses and moans, and it might have been tonight, save for the fact that I was fucking you. Something wasn't quite organic, however. Something bittersweet that was almost worse than a nightmare. There was something surreal in the desperate way you held me, how you could not tear your eyes from my face the entire time as I touched you, o my brother, and pushed myself inside your body.

You feel real, you said, in my dream.

What else would I be?

It would not become clear to me for many years.

Abruptly, the scenery shifted, as will happen in dreams, and we were facing each other once more in a flowing river, on a great platform, in a dark, domed room. And then we were standing together, my hand braced over yours, but I could not tell what it was I held. It felt alien and cold in my grasp, but everything else felt right. I heard you laugh.

Feels like old times, you said.

I have begun to dream again, but these dreams I keep locked down tight inside my mind. It's a deep place, Dante, as you well know.

They make no sense to me, a series of disjointed pictures, moments out of context- excerpts from a book that has yet to be published. But there is you. Of that I am sure.

Night restores me to you, o my brother, even if I don't understand its language.

Dreams are not much different in the Netherworld, clearer perhaps. Drawn with a finer instrument, colored with a better grade of pigment.

What I could never extract from my dreams before was a concrete image of you. You were older, I knew that, but I could never hold that picture upon waking- you always reverted to the Dante I knew in my youth. I could not carry you out of the dream, as you were in the dream, as you would be, in time.

But I see you now, brother, and I hold you in mind with disconcerting clarity, a memory without history, so real and complete that I wonder if you flicker like a light-bulb every time I recall it, as a piece of your soul is borrowed to illume the picture in my mind.

You are leaner, harder, deadlier. Your face has narrowed to beautiful planes and angles, and though I am bothered by the hollowness behind your eyes, I can hardly refuse the appeal of the compelling man in red, this stranger with the serious expression and rare, bitter smile.

Your hair is an improvement. Stylish and sharp, I quite approve. It suits you, as you are now. As- dare I say it? An adult.

So this is your final form, and here is mine.

The same men, more finely made. Like dreams in the Netherworld. Clearer, perhaps.

I would like to see you through untainted eyes once more.

I sit here now, on the edge of a precipice, not unlike the one I so impassively departed when I fell away from you, and shunned your outstretched hand. I think of it now, and it seems impossibly dramatic. Spoiled and histrionic, those young Sons of Sparda. It makes me laugh softly and shake my head.

What a Greek tragedy we've made of us, Dante. The kind found only in the books you'll never read.

And as you don't, you'll know nothing of the trials of Prometheus, or what became of Icarus when he plummeted. Nothing of Gods.

But you know of monsters, don't you?

And indeed, there _was_ one, monster or god, to complete that arc of the legend and make it whole through suffering.

"_In vinculis etiam audax," _I remember whispering to Tricia, my head in her lap and her tears on my brow, just before losing my mind. In chains, yet still bold.

I may have rejected her as a proxy mother, but I accepted her as an ally. I was always cordial, if removed.

"Just let him mold you, Vergil," she whispered brokenly, with the desperation of someone who can do nothing else, and though Mother would never say such a thing, in that moment, and only that moment, I could have believed she was Eva. "He can make it feel good, I promise. It won't hurt at all."

The feeling he chose was your lips. Your warmth. Your touch.

And it did hurt, Dante. More than you will ever know.

However, with all the darkest parts of my psyche isolated and magnified, I came to realize that Nero Angelo did not care.

Or remember.

It will be some time before I can laugh at that moment, the way I laugh at our misspent youth.

But I am autonomous, brother.

I no longer wear Mundus' collar, or walk beneath his poison, for Mundus is dead, as you know.

I have you to thank for that- you and your inadvertent chivalry. If Mother sent you to the store for milk, she could count on getting eggs. How very like you that seems, that you set out for vengeance and achieved salvation, missing, as you always had, every subtle hint of where I truly stood- metaphorically or otherwise.

Wrath has just exploded all over the horizon. I watched a Hell Pride shrieking and thrashing, pinned beneath it, giving me that ludicrously beseeching look they manage to have, despite their propensity for heedless evisceration.

Sometimes I think we are like Wrath, o my brother- stubbornly holding onto a heavy and precarious hatred that will ultimately destroy us both. No matter which one implodes, he will take the other with him. So Atlas held the world on the broad spread of his shoulders, and so we too hold our loathing upon our backs, in a far less noble emulation of his task.

But I have also held your body across my back. In time, you also held mine.

In the past, we have put down Wrath. That should not be forgotten.

I am wondering if you have forgotten me. Now that you have all of mommy's pretty baubles, of course, you have no reason to remember.

But I think, Dante, that you do.

When I looked at you through the eyes of Nero Angelo, I saw a ruthless, changed man. Not the spoiled brat I knew so well, who would risk any consequence on a whim, not the careless and self-indulgent younger brother who would cut off his nose to spite his face, truly believing he would never regret it later.

_Cetera desunt_, o my brother. The rest is lost.

I wish I could remember more of what transpired between us that day. But the bitterness in your eyes spoke volumes about loss and suffering.

I'd like to think I put it there.

As it was, so it is. As it is, so it shall be?


End file.
